’If I had never secreted the photograph, or the book with the handwriting, if I had shown them to Arthur, everything would have been so different, and I should have been free,’ he was thinking, when Jerry knocked timidly at the door, rousing him from his reverie, and making him start with a nameless tsar which was always haunting him.

‘Oh, Jerry, it is you,’ he said, as the little girl crossed the threshold, and shutting the door, stood with her back against it, and her hands behind her.  ‘What is it?’ he asked, as he saw her hesitating.

With a quick, jerky movement of the head, which set in motion the little rings of hair, now growing so fast, and brought his brother to his mind, Jerry replied: 

‘I came to tell you that Mr. Arthur has written the letter.’

‘What letter?’ Frank asked, for the moment forgetting the conversation he had held with the child in the Tramp House.

‘The one I promised to bring you to show you—­the one to Germany,’ was Jerry’s answer.

And then Frank remembered at once what, in the excitement of the diamond theft, had passed from his mind.

‘Yes, yes, I know; give it to me,’ he said, advancing rapidly toward her, and putting out his hand.  ’When did he write it?  Give it to me, please.’

‘But not to keep,’ Jerry said, struck by something in his face and manner which, it seemed to her, meant danger to the letter.

‘Let me see it,’ he continued.

And rather reluctantly Jerry handed him a bulky letter, the direction of which covered nearly the whole of one side of the envelope.

Very nervously Frank scanned the address, which might as well have been in the Fiji language for any idea it conveyed to him.

‘To whom is it directed?  I cannot read German,’ he said

‘I don’t know,’ Jerry replied.  ’I have not looked at it, and would rather not.’

‘Why, what a little prude you are;’ and Frank laughed uneasily.  ’What possible harm is there in reading an address?  The postmaster has to do it, and any one who took it to the office would do it if he could.’

This sounded reasonable enough, and standing beside him, while he held the letter a little way from her, Jerry read the address in German first, then, as he said to her:  ’I don’t understand that lingo, put it into English,’ she read again: 

’To Marguerite Heinrich, if living, and if dead to any of her friends; or to the postmaster at Wiesbaden, Germany.  If not delivered within two months, return to Arthur Tracy, Tracy Park, Shannondale, Mass., U.S.A.’

‘Marguerite—­Marguerite Heinrich!’ Frank repeated, ’That is not Gretchen.  The letter is not to her.’

‘I guess it is,’ Jerry replied.  ’He told me once that Gretchen was a pet name for Marguerite.’

‘Yes,’ Frank returned, with a sigh, as this little crumb of hope was swept away, while to himself he added:  ’At all events it is not Marguerite Tracy, and that makes me less a scoundrel than I should otherwise be.  If he had written a little more it would have run over to the other side of the envelope.  Any one would know he was crazy,’ he continued, with a sickly attempt at a smile, while Jerry stood waiting to take the letter from him.