Hitherto she had not been anxious for further information concerning her parentage and early life. There were times when she felt some small measure of dissatisfaction at the thought that she did not know who she really was. But this feeling was held in check by the consideration that, if her parents had been good and kind, she would probably not have been in a position to need the loving service which had been rendered to her by Mr. and Mrs. Burton; and she felt that she would a thousand times rather have them for her father and mother, than be compelled to give those dear names to such persons as it was more than likely her actual parents had been. For the most part, therefore, she had feared, rather than hoped, that her real father and mother might appear. Now, however, vague surmisings were being awakened in the mind of the young secretary. Her kind employer had mysteriously lost a little girl. This suggested to her a new set of possibilities as to her own past. It came to her mind that perhaps she also had been lost, and that the misery she vaguely remembered, had been inflicted by other hands than those of her parents. If, like little Marian, she had actually wandered away, it was probably no fault of 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.