father's desk. Mr. Prescott said they must
have got the letter all right, and he made
me promise to tell you all about it some
day. If he hadn't I never would. George,
he wanted me to be his wife."

She blushed again like a young girl, and
turned her head away.

"You could not do that, mother," I said.

"No, George, no," she answered; "not
after being the wife of young Mr. Haddan.
But he was very kind and good, and left us
all a legacy equal to the settlement he had
refused for us, and said Fortune was to be
brought up with you two, to show that he
did not believe any harm of me. That is
all I have to tell you."

It was enough to astonish and overwhelm
me. If this were true, instead of being poor
George Haddan, with no more than five
thousand dollars in my possession, I was at
this moment the rightful owner of twelve
thousand pounds a year, with all the
accumulations of a long minority. But, if not
true, what had I to offer Fortune? As it
was, until I had established my claim I had
nothing but a doubtful name. My mother
said she had been afraid I should be
unsettled. Unsettled! I should think I was.

I went to look for Fortune, and hunted
about for her till I found her in our old
schoolroom, busy about some woman's work.
Then and there I repeated to her everything
I had just heard.

I am Fortune mentioned above. I shall
tell the rest of Mrs. Haddan's history, for
George makes a great trouble of writing.
Nobody could ever make me believe those
documents were lost. Destroyed they might
be, but not lost. A packet of that size,
containing very valuable papers, which were,
however, of no value except to the Haddan
family, could not have been lost by mail,
unless some special accident had befallen all
the mail- bags. To mail such a packet in the
ordinary way was precisely such a thing as
man, and man alone, could have been
guilty of, especially so many years back,
when the service between New York and
London was not what it is now. But a
will, a marriage certificate, and a long letter
would make a noticeable parcel. Don't tell
me it was lost.

What must we do? Why, start for
England by the very first steamer after my
birthday. If I had only been one-and-
twenty fifteen years ago I should have
done it then, and traced that packet from
the post-office to the hands that opened it.
The search would be more difficult now, but
it must be made. We must first discover,
as quietly as we could, the church where
Mrs. Haddan was married. We must go
quietly to work, and make sure of that
first.

We were all very fond of Mrs. Haddan,
but she was one of the meekest of women
—the very feeblest reed of a woman I ever
knew. To think of her small body and
soul having guarded such a secret as this
from us all these years drove me nearly
frantic. She was very little, with a low,
plaintive voice and frightened manner.
Her face was small, with a pretty
complexion and large, brown, forlorn eyes,
glistening with tears as readily at a spot
on her new bonnet strings as at the death
of a friend. It was very difficult to move
her, for she was one of those creatures that
take root deeply, and are as hard to pluck
up as tangle-grass. She told us weeping
that her Aunt Becket had warned her
never to show her face in England again;
and she assured us over and over again,
with great solemnity, that she could not
recognise the church where she had been
married, and she did not remember in the
least which part of London it was in.
Perhaps it had been a chapel she suggested,
and what should we do then? I knew
better. I felt certain that any woman with
a grain of sense, and with eyes in her
head, would tell the place where she was
married when she saw it again. But there
—Mrs. Haddan had been nothing but an
English baby of seventeen instead of an
intelligent American woman of that age.

I say nothing about our voyage. Mrs.
Haddan, as might have been expected of
a woman with positively no strength of
mind, was very sick all the way, and wept
and moaned during every interval when
she could weep and moan. Margaret
waited upon her mother, while George and
I walked miles and miles of the deck,
planning what we should do. What we
did upon landing was to go straight on by
express to London. It was night when we
reached it; and even I could not expect
Mrs. Haddan to recognise our church in
the dark. But the next day, and for many
days following, we hired a carriage and
drove up and down the streets, up and
down the streets, till we were nearly crazy.

This was how we went on: at the
outside view of any church, or of any
building at all approaching an ecclesiastical
style of architecture, Mrs. Haddan would
ask faintly that the carriage might be
drawn up in front of it. Then she leaned