’None, ‘cause Tom would eat them all.’

In this reply there was a shrewdness which poor Jack never intended, and the laugh which followed his answer confused and bewildered him.  There was a tutor now at Tracy Park for Jack, but Maude had been transferred to Arthur’s care.  This was wholly due to Jerry, who alone could have induced him to let Maude share her instruction.  Arthur did not care for Maude.  She was dull, he said, and would never learn her lessons.  But Jerry coaxed so hard that Arthur consented at last, and when Jerry had been with him about three years, Maude became his pupil, and that of Jerry as well, for nearly every day when the lessons were over the two little girls might have been seen sitting together under the trees in the park, or in some corner of the house, Maude puzzled, and perplexed, and worried, and Jerry anxious, decided, and peremptory, as she went over and over again with what was so clear to her and so hazy to her friend.

‘Oh, dear me, suz, what does ail you?’ she said, one day, with a stamp of her foot, after she had tried in vain to make Maude see through a simple sum in long division.  ’Can’t you remember first to divide, second multiply, third subtract, and fourth bring down?’

’No, I can’t.  I can’t remember anything, and if I could, how do I know what to divide or what to bring down?  I am stupid, and shall never know anything,’ was Maude’s sobbing reply, as she covered her face with her slate.

Maude’s tears always moved Jerry, who tried to reassure the weeping girl with the assurance that perhaps, if she tried very hard, she might some time know enough to teach a district school.  This was the height of Jerry’s ambition, to teach a district school and board around; but Maude’s aspirations were different.  She was rich.  She was to be a belle and wear diamonds and satins like her mother; and so it did not matter so much whether she understood long division or not, though it did hurt her a little to be so far outstripped by Jerry, who was younger than herself.

To Arthur, Jerry was a constant delight and surprise, and nothing astonished or pleased him more than the avidity with which she took up German.  This language was like play to her, and by the time she was ten years old she spoke, and read, and wrote it almost as well as Arthur himself.

‘It takes me back somewhere, I can’t tell where,’ she said to him; ’and I seem to be somebody else than Jerry Crawford, and I hear music and see people, and a pale face is close to me, and I get all confused trying to remember things which come and go.’

Only once after her first day at the park had she enacted the pantomime of the sick woman and the nurse, and then she had done it at Arthur’s request.  But it was not quite as thrilling as at first; the him for whom the dying woman had prayed was omitted, and the whole was mixed with the Tramp House, and the carpet-bag, and Harold, who was now a youth of seventeen, and a student at the high school in Shannondale, where he was making as rapid progress in his studies as Jerry was at the park.