CHAPTER XL.
'DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE ?' Judging from the result, this question might far better have been put to rather than by Peterkin, as he stood puffing, and hot, and indignant in the Tramp House, looking down upon Jerrie, who was sitting upon the wooden bench, with her aching head resting upon a corner of the old table standing against the wall just where it stood that stormy night fifteen years ago, when death claimed the woman beside her, but left her unharmed.
After saying good-bye to Maude, Jerrie had walked very slowly through the park, stopping more than once to rest upon the seats scattered here and there, and wondering more and more at the feeling which oppressed her and the terrible pain in her head, which grew constantly worse as she went on.
'I'm afraid I'm going to be sick,' she said to herself.

'I never felt this way before; and no wonder, with all I have gone through the last few weeks.

The getting ready for the commencement, the coming home, and all the excitement which followed, with three men, one after another, offering themselves to me, and the drenching that night in the rain, and then watching by Maude without a wink of sleep, it is enough to make a behemoth sick, and I am so dizzy and hot--' She had reached the Tramp House by this time, and, feeling that she could go no farther without resting herself, she went in, and seating herself upon the bench, laid her tired, aching head upon the table, and felt again for a few moments that strange sensation as if the top of her head were rising up and up until she could not reach it with her hand, for she tried, and thought of Ann Eliza, with her hair piled so high on her head.
'The loss of an inch or two might improve me,' she said, though I'd rather keep my scalp.' Then she seemed to be drifting away into the realms of sleep, and all around her were confusion and bewilderment.

The window, across which the woodbine was growing, changed places with the door; the floor rose up and bowed to her, while the room was full of faces, beckoning to and smiling upon her.

Faces like the one she knew so well, the pale face in the chair; faces like her own, as she remembered it when a child; faces like the dark woman dead so long ago and buried in the Tracy lot, and faces like Arthur's as she had seen him oftenest, when he spoke so lovingly, and called her little Cherry.