“What was the pattern of the sun-bonnet? Was it a small, pink sprig, on a white ground?”
“Why, you must have seen it, ma’am!” was Mrs. Burton’s startled reply. “That was the very thing!”
“Perhaps I have,” responded Miss Jemima, “and perhaps I haven’t.”
Mrs. Burton hardly knew what to say.
“Well,” she resumed, at last, “Miss Owen has kept the sun-bonnet, and the one shoe, and two or three other little things; and I’m sure she will be glad to let you see them. But, may I ask, Miss Horn, what——”
But “Cobbler” Horn interrupted her.
“I think, Jemima, we had now better tell our kind friends why we are asking these questions.”
“Yes,” said Miss Jemima; “I should have told them at first.”
“Well,” resumed “Cobbler” Horn, turning to Mr. and Mrs. Burton, and speaking with an emotion which he could no longer conceal, “we have reason to believe that your adopted daughter—don’t let me shock you—is our little lost Marian, of whom you have several times heard me speak; and we are anxious to make sure if this is really the case.”
In the nature of things, Mr. and Mrs. Burton were not so much surprised as they would have been if the course of events had not, in some measure, prepared them for the announcement which “Cobbler” Horn had now made. Yet they experienced a slight shock; for even an expected crisis cannot be fully realized till it actually arrives.