It was dark, too, in the Gretchen room, as they called it now, but Frank threw open the blinds and let in a flood of light upon the picture, before which Jerrie stood reverently, and with feelings such as she had never experienced before, as she looked upon that lovely, girlish face.
A new idea had taken possession of Jerrie since she had last seen that picture, and while, unsuspected by her, Frank was studying first her features and then those of Gretchen, she was struggling frantically with the past, which seemed clearer than before.

Again she saw the low room far away--the tall stove in the corner, the dark woman opening the door, the firelight on the white face in the chair; and this time memory added another item to the picture, and she of the white face and wavy golden hair seemed to hold a writing-desk on her lap and a piece of paper on which the pale hands were tracing words slowly and feebly, as if the effort were a pain.
'Oh, I can almost remember,' she whispered, just as Frank's voice broke the spell by saying: 'Good-morning, Gretchen.

Arthur is in California, but he is surely coming back; he bade me tell you so.' 'Is he crazy as well as Mr.Arthur?
Are we all crazy together ?' Jerrie asked herself, as she watched him closing the blinds and shutting out the sunlight from the room, so that the picture was in shadow now and seemed nothing but bits of colored glass.
'I have kept my promise to Arthur; and now for Maude,' Frank said, and Jerry was conscious of a new and strange sensation--a feeling of ownership and possession, as she went through the broad hall, glancing in at one handsome room after another, until she reached Maude's door.
On the threshold she met Mrs.Frank, just coming out, and elegantly attired in a tasteful muslin wrapper, with more lace and embroidery upon it than Jerrie had ever worn in her life; her hair was carefully dressed with a cap which looked like a pen-wiper or doll's bonnet, it was so small, perched on the top of it; her face was powdered, and her manner was one of languor and fine-ladyism, which she had cultivated so assiduously and achieved so successfully.

Not a muscle of her face changed when she saw Jerrie, but she closed Maude's door quickly, and stepping into the hall, offered the tips of her fingers, as she said, in a fretful, rather than a welcoming tone: 'Good-morning.

You are very late.