when she had at last reached her room, her first
act was to lock the door. Then she knelt before her small hair-covered
travelling trunk, and, having unlocked it, she slowly raised the lid and
placed it back against the wall. For a moment she hesitated, and then,
plunging her arm down at one corner of the trunk, amongst its various
contents, she brought up, from the hidden depths, a small tissue paper
parcel. This she opened carefully, and disclosed a tiny shoe, homely but
neat, a little child's chemise, and an old, faded, pink print sun-bonnet,
minus a string. In the upper leather of the shoe were several cuts, the
work of some wanton hand. Sitting back upon her heels, she let the open
parcel fall into her lap.

"What would I not give," she sighed, "to find the fellow of this little
shoe! But no doubt it has long ago rotted at the bottom of some muddy
ditch!"

Then, for the hundredth time, she examined the little chemise, at one
corner of which were worked, in red cotton, the letters "M.H."

"They have told me again and again that I had this chemise on when I was
found. Of course that doesn't prove that it was my own, and I have never
supposed that those two letters stand for my name. But now--well, may it
not be so, after all? It was really no more than a guess, on the part of
Mr. and Mrs. Burton, that my name was Mary Ann Owen; and, from what I can
see, it's just as likely to have been anything else. Let me think; what
name might 'M.H.' stand for? Mary Hall? Margaret Harper? Mari----. No, no,
I dare not think that--at least, not yet!"

Once more she wrapped up her little parcel of relics, and returned it to
its place at the bottom of her trunk.

"Heigho!" she exclaimed, as, having closed and locked the trunk, she
sprang to her feet. "How I do wonder who I am!"

[Illustration: "A tiny shoe."--_Page 264._]

CHAPTER XXXVI.

TOMMY DUDGEON UNDERTAKES A DELICATE ENTERPRISE.

The time which had elapsed since the first visit of Miss Owen to the house
of "the little Twin Brethren" had constituted, for Tommy Dudgeon, a period
of mental unrest. If he had been perturbed before, he was twice as uneasy
now. He had made the joyous discovery which he had been expecting to make
almost ever since he had seen the young secretary walking in her emphatic
way along the street. But, joyous as the discovery was, the making of it
had actually increased the perturbation of his mind. Hi