theirs, and perhaps they had been mourning for
her all these years. Then, almost for the first time, she was conscious of
an ardent desire to know who her parents had been. Over this question she
pondered often and long. She could do nothing more--except pray. And pray
she did. She asked that, if it were right and best, the cloud of obscurity
might be lifted from her earlier years. And yet, as day by day she
persisted in this prayer, she had a feeling that the prayer itself, and
the desire from which it proceeded, might, perhaps, constitute a species
of disloyalty to the only parents she seemed ever to have known. To this
feeling her great love and strong conscientiousness gave birth. Yet she
could neither repress her desire nor refrain from her prayer.

But there was another thing which "Cobbler" Horn had said. When his
secretary asked him what little Marian would probably be like, if she were
still alive, he, in all simplicity, and without perceiving the possible
direction that might be given to her thoughts, had replied that his lost
child, if living, would be not unlike what his secretary actually was. He
probably intended no more than that there might be a general resemblance
between the two girls; and he might be mistaken even in that. Miss Owen
herself took such a view of the matter at the time, and passed it lightly
by. But, afterwards, in the course of her ponderings, it came back again.
The unpremeditated words, in which her employer had admitted the
probability of a resemblance between herself and what his own lost child
might most likely have become, seemed to find their place amongst the
other strange things which were perplexing her mind.

Very deeply Miss Owen pondered these many puzzling things, from day to
day. A momentous possibility seemed to be dawning on her view; but she was
like one who, being but half-awake, cannot decide whether the brightness
of coming day may not, after all, be merely a dim dream-light which will
presently fade away. It appeared to her sometimes as though she were on
the verge of the momentous discovery which she had often wondered whether
she would ever make. Could it be that the mystery of her parentage was
about to be solved, and that with a result which would be altogether to
her mind? But, as often as she reached this point, she pulled herself
sharply up. Her name was Mary Ann Owen: that settled the question at once.
But was it so? There came a time when she began to have