Then he told his father, who started at once for the cottage, where Mrs.Crawford refused to let him see Jerrie, saying that the doctor's orders were that she should be kept perfectly quiet.

But as they stood talking together near the open door, Jerrie's voice was heard calling: 'Let Mr.Frank come up.' So Frank went up, and, notwithstanding all he had heard from Tom, he was surprised at Jerrie's flushed face and the unnatural expression of her eyes, which turned so eagerly toward him as he came in.
'Oh, Mr.Tracy,' she said, as he sat down beside her and took one of her burning hands in his, 'you have always been kind to me, haven't you ?' 'Yes,' he replied, with a keen pang of remorse, and wondering if she would call it kindness if she knew all that he did.
'And I think you like me some,' she continued: 'don't you ?' 'Like you!' he repeated; 'yes, more than you can ever know.

Why, sometimes I think I like you almost as much as I do Maude.' As if the mention of Maude had sent her thoughts backward in a very different channel, she said abruptly, while she held his gaze steadily with her bright eyes: 'You posted that letter ?' Frank knew perfectly well that she meant the letter which, together with the photograph, and the Bible, and the lock of the baby's golden hair, had lain for years in his private drawer--the letter whose superscription he had studied so many times, and which had seldom been absent from his thoughts an hour since that night when, from her perch on the gate-post, Jerrie had startled him with the question she was asking him now.

But be affected ignorance and said, as indifferently as he could, with those blue eyes upon him seeming to read his inmost thoughts: 'What letter do you mean ?' 'Why, the one Mr.Arthur wrote to Gretchen, or her friends, in Wiesbaden, and gave me to post.

You took it for me to the office, and I sat on the gate so long in the darkness waiting for you to come and tell me you had posted it sure.' 'Oh, yes, I remember it perfectly, and how you frightened me sitting up there so high like a goblin,' Frank answered, falteringly, his face as crimson now as Jerrie's, and his eyes dropping beneath her gaze.
'Gretchen's friends never got that letter,' Jerrie continued.
'No, they never got it,' Frank answered, mechanically.
'If they had,' Jerrie went on, 'they would have answered it, for she had friends there.' Frank looked up quickly and curiously at the girl talking so strangely to him.