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At first "Cobbler" Horn had gathered nothing intelligible from the impassioned apostrophe of his excited little friend; but, by degrees, there dawned upon him some faint gleam of what its meaning might be. "The sec'tary!" That was the quaint term by which Tommy was wont to designate Miss Owen. But their conversation had been drifting in the direction of his little lost Marian.

"I say," he said presently with ingenuous frankness, "I asks your pardon for what I said to you yesterday. I dessay you make a very good Sec'tary, and Losh! the Lord Mayor himself mightn't have dared to strike that d d fine Court spark. They say he has fought twenty duels." "You have my full forgiveness," said Landless, smiling. "That's right!" cried the other, relieved.

It was about the sec'tary, and some one else; and yet not anybody else, because they're both the same. May I tell you, Mr. Horn? Can you bear it, do you think?"

His brother was trying to put one of the twins to sleep by carrying it to and fro; his brother's wife was making bread. He raised his hands. "She's come back!" he cried. Then, recollecting himself, he said, more quietly, "I mean I've seen the sec'tary."

He cast himself on the mercy of his friend. "Oh," he cried, in thrilling tones, "can't you see it? Can't you feel it every day? The sec'tary! The sec'tary! If it is so plain to me, how can you be so blind?" Then he darted from the room, and betook himself home with all speed.

It will be remembered that, after bursting into the back-room with the declaration, "She's come back!" Tommy Dudgeon had suddenly pulled himself up and substituted the commonplace statement that he had "seen the sec'tary."

He had, indeed, seemed to see, this afternoon, the very same determined look, and the pretty purposeful step, with which the little maid whom he had loved had passed out of his sight so long ago. But he now assured himself that "it was only the sec'tary after all." The child, for whom he had not ceased to mourn, would certainly come back, but not like that.

"Yes," he said, "I can be quite sure when I have known the little girl as I knew that one; and when I have watched, and listened to, the young woman, as I have been watching and listening to the sec'tary for these months past." "Cobbler" Horn and Miss Jemima exchanged glances. "This is truly wonderful!" said he. "Not at all!" retorted she.

As yet, he had never spoken to the "sec'tary," or heard her speak. He made his most polite bow, as she stepped into his shop. But how his heart thumped! He was shy with ladies at the best; but now, hope and fear, and a vague feeling that, with the entrance of this sprightly little lady, the past had all come back, increased his habitual nervousness a hundredfold.

But that she was so womanly and ladylike, and that he knew she was "only the sec'tary," he would have been ready to advance upon her with outstretched hands, and ask her if she had quite forgotten Tommy Dudgeon her old friend, Tommy? As it was, he stood staring like one bewitched. Miss Owen, wondering at his silence, and his fixed gaze, repeated her question in another form.