in all, had
passed through great privation and danger, but they finally had been
taken aboard a steamer going east. The list of persons saved in this
boat had been in due time received by Mr. Reed, who, after careful
investigation, at last ascertained to a certainty that they all were
adults, and that neither Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, nor Wolcott Reed's
widow, were of the number. He communicated in person or by letter with
all of them excepting one; and that one was a woman, who was described
as a tall, dark-complexioned girl, a genteel servant, who, as three of
the men declared, had been occasionally seen, pacing up and down the
deck of the ill-fated vessel during the early part of the voyage,
carrying a "very small baby" in her arms. She had given her name as
Ellen Lee; had accepted assistance from the ship's company, and finally
she had been traced by Mr. Reed's clerk, Henry Wakeley, to an obscure
boarding-house in Liverpool. Going there to see her, Mr. Wakeley had
been told that she was "out;" and calling there again, late on the same
day, he learned that she had paid her bill and left the house four hours
before.

After that, all efforts to find her, both on the part of the clerk and
of Mr. Reed, had been unavailing; though to this day, as the latter
assured Donald, detectives in Liverpool and London had her name and
description, as belonging to a person "to be found."

"But do they know your address?" asked Donald.

"Oh, yes, I shall be notified at once if any news is heard of her; but
after all these years there is hardly a possibility of that. Ellen Lees
are plentiful enough; it is not an uncommon name, I find; but that
particular Ellen Lee seems to have vanished from the earth."

CHAPTER XXVII.

DELIA, OR DOROTHY?

AS Donald listened to his uncle by the study-window, on that starlit
evening, many things that he had heard from Sailor Jack rose in his
memory and blended with Mr. Reed's words. Part of the strange story was
already familiar to him. He needed only a hint of the shipwreck to have
the scene vividly before him. He and Dorry had often heard of it, and of
their first coming to Nestletown. They knew that Uncle George had easily
established his claim to the babies, as these and the one that was lost
were the only infants among the passengers, and that he had brought them
and Sailor Jack home with him from New York; that Jack, through his
devotion to the children, had been induced to give up t