drawn. There was little room for doubt; but he must make assurance
doubly sure. He touched the electric bell at the head of the bed, and the
nurse immediately appeared.

"Will you be so good as to tell Miss Horn I should like to see her at
once."

The nurse, marking the eagerness with which the request was uttered, and
observing the little shoe on the counterpane, perceived that the occasion
was urgent, and departed on her errand with all speed.

"I don't think he is any worse this morning," she said to Miss Jemima when
she had delivered her message. "Indeed he seems, quite unaccountably, to
be very much better. But it is evident something has happened."

Without waiting to hear more, Miss Jemima hurried to her brother's room.
Sitting up in bed, with a happy face, he was holding in his hand a
dilapidated child's shoe, which he placed in his sister's hands as soon
as she approached the bed.

"Jemima, look at that!" he said joyously.

Thinking it was the shoe which her brother had always preserved with so
much care, she took it, and examined it with much concern.

"Whoever can have cut it about like that?" she cried.

"Cobbler" Horn hastened to rectify her mistake.

"No, Jemima," he said, in a tone of reverent exultation; "it's the other
shoe--the one we've been wanting to find all these years!"

The first thought of Miss Jemima was that her brother had gone mad. Then
she examined the shoe more closely.

"To be sure!" she said. "How foolish of me! Those cuts were made long
ago."

As she spoke, she put her hand on the table at the bedside, to steady
herself.

"Brother," she demanded, in trembling tones, "where did you get this shoe?
Did it come by the morning post?"

"Cobbler" Horn answered deliberately. He would give his sister time to
take in the meaning of his words.

"It has been in the possession of Miss Owen. She brought it to me just
now."

"Miss Owen?"

Miss Jemima's first impulse was towards indignation. What had Miss Owen
been doing with the shoe? But the next moment, she reflected that there
must be some reasonable explanation of the fact that the shoe had been in
the possession of her brother's secretary--though what that explanation
might be Miss Jemima could not, as yet, divine.

"She has had it," resumed "Cobbler" Horn, in the same quiet tone as
before, "ever since she was a little girl. She was wearing it when she was
found by the good people by whom she was adopted."

Then light ca