After dinner, there was speech-making and merriment; and then the people left the tent, and dispersed about the grounds. While the former part of this process was in progress, Miss Owen heard a fragment of conversation which caused her to tingle to her finger-tips. She had just moved towards one of the tables for the purpose of helping an old woman to rise from her seat, and her presence was not perceived by the speakers, whose faces were turned the other way. They were two village gossips, a middle-aged woman and a younger one.
“Is she his daughter?” were the words that fell upon the young secretary’s ears, spoken by the elder woman in a stage whisper.
“No,” replied the other, in a similar tone. “He never had but one child—her as was lost. This one’s the secretary, or some such.”
“Well, I do say as she’d pass for his own daughter anywhere.”
Miss Owen was not nervous; but her heart beat tumultuously at the thoughts which this whispered colloquy suggested to her mind. She placed her hand upon the table to steady herself, as the two women, all unconscious of the effect of their gossiping words, moved slowly away.
“The Golden Shoemaker” and his friends arrived at Cottonborough late that night. A carriage was waiting for them at the station; and, having said “good night” to Mr. Durnford and Tommy Dudgeon, they were soon driven home. They were a quiet—almost silent—party. The events of the day had supplied them with much food for thought. The image of his little lost Marian presented itself vividly to the mind of “Cobbler” Horn to-night. Miss Jemima’s thoughts dwelt on what was her one tender memory—that of the tiny, dark-eyed damsel who had so mysteriously vanished from the sphere of her authority so long ago.
And Miss Owen? Well, 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!”