Then, stopping suddenly, he went up to her, and pushing her soft, wavy hair from her forehead, looking long and earnestly into her face.

‘Cherry,’ he said at last, using the pet name he often gave her, ’you are some like Gretchen as she must have been when of your age.  Oh, if you only were hers and mine!  But there was no child; and yet—­and yet—­’

He seemed to be thinking intently for a moment, and then going to a drawer in his writing desk, which Jerry had never seen open before, he took out a worn, yellow letter, and ran his eye rapidly over it until he found a certain paragraph, which he bade Jerry read.

The paragraph was as follows: 

’I have something to tell you when you come, which I am sure will make you as glad as I am.’

Jerry read it aloud slowly, for the handwriting was cramped and irregular, and then looked up questioningly to Arthur, who said to her: 

’What do you think she meant by the something which would make me glad as she was?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jerry answered him.  ‘Who wrote it?  Gretchen?’

’Yes, Gretchen; it is her last letter to me, and I never went back to see what she meant, for the bees were bad in my head and I forgot everything, even Gretchen herself.  Poor little Gretchen!  What was the idea which came to me like a flash of lightning, in regard to this letter, when I heard you sing?  It is gone, and I cannot recall it.’

There was a worried, anxious look on his face as he put the letter away, and went on talking to himself of Gretchen, saying he was going to write her again, or her friends, and find out what she meant.

The next day Jerry met Frank in the Tramp House, as we have described, and gave him the promise to bring him any letter directed to Germany which Arthur might entrust to her.  But the promise weighed heavily upon her as she walked slowly on towards the field where Harold was at work, and where she found him resting for a moment under the shadow of a wide-spreading butternut.  He looked tired and pale, and there were great drops of sweat upon his white forehead, and an expression on his face which Jerry did not understand.

Harold was not in a very happy frame of mind.  Naturally cheerful and hopeful, it was not often that he gave way to fits of despondency, or repining at his humble lot, so different from that of the boys of his own age, with whom he came in daily contact, both at school and in the town.

Dick St. Claire, his most intimate friend, always treated him as if he were fully his equal, and often stood between him and the remarks which boys made thoughtlessly, and which, while they mean so little, wound to the quick such sensitive natures as Harold’s.  But not even Dick St. Claire could keep Tom Tracy in check.  With each succeeding year he grew more and more supercilious and unbearable, pluming himself upon his position as a Tracy of Tracy Park, and this