Part 56 (1/2)

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. What had she heard? What did she know? or was this only an outburst of insanity? She certainly looked crazy as she lay there talking to him. He was sure of it a moment after when, as if the nature of her thoughts had changed suddenly, she said to him:

'Yes, you have been very kind to me, you and Maude--you and Maude--and I shan't forget it. Tell her I shan't forget it.--I shan't forget it.'

She repeated this rapidly, and was growing so wild and excited that Frank thought it advisable to leave her. As he arose to go she looked up pleadingly at him, and said:

'Kiss me, Mr. Tracy, please.'

Had he been struck by lightning, Frank could hardly have been more astonished than he was at this singular request, and for a moment he stared blankly at the girl who had made it, not because he was at all averse to granting it, but because he doubted the propriety of the act, even if she were crazy. But something in Jerrie's face, like Arthur's, mastered him, and, stooping down, he kissed the parched lips through which the breath came so hotly, wondering as he did so what Dolly would say if she could see him, a white-haired man of forty-five, kissing a young girl of nineteen, and that girl Jerrie Crawford.

'Thanks,' Jerrie said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. 'I think you have been chewing tobacco, haven't you? But I sha'nt forget it; I sha'nt forget it. I shall do right. I shall do right. Tell Maude so; tell Maude so.'

She was certainly growing worse, Frank thought, as he went down to confer with Mrs. Crawford as to what ought to be done, and to offer his services. He would remain there that afternoon, he said, and send a servant over to be in the house during the night.

'She is very sick,' he said; 'but it does not seem as if her sickness could be caused wholly by that bruise on her head. Do you think Peterkin struck her?'

'She says so,' was Mrs. Crawford's reply, 'though why he should do it, I cannot guess.'

Then she added that a servant would not be necessary, as Harold would be home by seven.

'But he may not,' Frank replied. 'Squire Harrington came at two, and reported that the suit was not called until so late that they would not probably get through with the witnesses to-day, so Hal may not be here, and I will send Rob anyway.'

On his way home Frank, too, looked in at the Tramp House, and saw the broken-down table, and hunted for the missing leg, and with Tom concluded that something unusual had taken place there, though he could not guess what.

That evening, as Jerrie grew more and more restless and talkative, Mrs.

Crawford listened anxiously for the train, and when it came, waited and watched for Harold, but watched in vain, for Harold did not come.

Several of her neighbors, however, did come; those who had gone to the city out of curiosity to attend the lawsuit, and 'see old Peterkin squirm and hear him swear;' and could she have looked into the houses in the village that night, she would have heard some startling news, for almost before the train rolled away from the platform, everybody at or near the station had been told that Mrs. Tracy's diamonds, lost nine or ten years ago, had been found in Harold Hastings' pocket, and that he was under arrest.

Such news travels fast, and it reached the Park House just as the family were finis.h.i.+ng their late dinner.