“Tell me, child,” said the other woman, with restrained eagerness, “what were the things found upon you when you were taken from the river?”

“Yes,” answered the girl, “I will.  But I have not told you all my story, for this is but the prelude.  About a year ago a young doctor rented an office in our block.  We met each other, at first only now and then, and afterwards oftener; and six months ago he told me that he loved me.”

She paused, and sat with half opened lips and dreamy eyes, looking back into the past six months.

“And the things found upon you”——­

“Yes, I will show them to you when you have heard all my story.  He wanted to marry me, and has asked me every week since.  I have told him that I love him, but I have not said I would marry him.  I don’t think it would be right for me to do so, unless I could clear up this mystery.  I believe he is going to be great and rich and famous, and there might come a time when he would be ashamed of me.  I don’t say that I shall never marry him; for I have hoped—­I have a presentiment that in some strange way I shall find out who I am, and who my parents were.  It may be mere imagination on my part, but somehow I believe it is more than that.”

“Are you sure there was no mark on the things that were found upon you?” said the elder woman.

“Ah yes,” sighed Clara, “I am sure, for I have looked at them a hundred times.  They tell me nothing, and yet they suggest to me many things.  Come,” she said, taking the other by the hand, “and I will show them to you.”

She led the way along the hall to her sitting-room, and to her bedchamber beyond.  It was a small room hung with paper showing a pattern of morning-glories on a light ground, with dotted muslin curtains, a white iron bedstead, a few prints on the wall, a rocking-chair—­a very dainty room.  She went to the maple dressing-case, and opened one of the drawers.

As they stood for a moment, the mirror reflecting and framing their image, more than one point of resemblance between them was emphasized.  There was something of the same oval face, and in Clara’s hair a faint suggestion of the wave in the older woman’s; and though Clara was fairer of complexion, and her eyes were gray and the other’s black, there was visible, under the influence of the momentary excitement, one of those indefinable likenesses which are at times encountered,—­sometimes marking blood relationship, sometimes the impress of a common training; in one case perhaps a mere earmark of temperament, and in another the index of a type.  Except for the difference in color, one might imagine that if the younger woman were twenty years older the resemblance would be still more apparent.

Clara reached her hand into the drawer and drew out a folded packet, which she unwrapped, Mrs. Harper following her movements meanwhile with a suppressed intensity of interest which Clara, had she not been absorbed in her own thoughts, could not have failed to observe.