I think Gretchen is dead.' 'Yes, she is dead,' Jerry said, decidedly; 'but tell me all you know of the time I came.' So Harold told her again what he knew personally of the tragedy, and all he remembered to have heard.

There was little which Jerrie did not already know, for as Harold had been a boy when it happened, he had not heard all that was said, and since that time other matters had crowded the incidents of the death and burial out of his mind.

The thing most real to him was Jerrie herself, the beautiful girl sitting by his side, astonishing him so with her mood and her questions.

He had seen her often in her spells, as he called them; when she acted her pantomimes, and talked to people whom she said she saw; but he had only thought of them as the vagaries of a peculiar mind--a German mind his grandmother said, and he accepted her theory as the correct one.
He had never seen Jerrie as she was now, with that rapt look in her face and in her eyes, which shone with a strange light as she went on to speak of the things which sometimes came and went so fast, and which she tried in vain to retain.

It had never occurred to him that the woman he had found dead was not her mother, and he thought her crazy when she put the question to him.