Resuming her pen, she wrote: 

’Don’t give her all sentimental poetry and love trash, but something solid—­something historical, which she can remember and talk about with you.’

In his third letter to Jerrie, after the receipt of her instructions, Harold wrote as follows: 

’I have offered my services as reader, and tried the solid on Maude as you advised—­have read her fifty pages of Grote’s History of Greece; but when I got as far as Homeric Theogony, she looked piteously at me, while with Hesiod and Orpheus she was hopelessly bewildered, and by the time I reached the extra Hellenic religion she was fast asleep!  I do not believe her mind is strong enough to grapple with those old Greek chaps; at all events they worry her, and tire her more than they rest.  So I have abandoned the gods and come down to common people, and am reading to her Tennyson’s poems.  Have read the May Queen four times, until I do believe she knows it by heart.  She has a great liking for the last portion of it, especially the lines: 

    “I shall not forget you, mother: 
    I shall hear you when you pass,
  With your feet above my head
    In the long and pleasant grass.”

’I saw her cry one day when I read that to her.  Poor little Maude!  She is very frail, but no one seems to think her in danger, she has so brilliant a color, and always seems so bright.’

Jerrie read this letter two or three times, and each time with an increased sense of comfort.  No man who really loved a girl could speak of her mental weakness to another as Harold had spoken of Maude’s to her, and it might be after all that he merely thought of her as a friend, whom he had always known.  So the cloud was lifted in part, and she only felt a greater anxiety for Maude’s health, which as the spring advanced, grew stronger, so that it was almost certain that she would come to Vassar in the summer and see her friend graduated.

Such was the state of affairs when Nina repeated to Jerrie what Harold had said to her at the musicale the previous winter.  All day long there was a note of gladness in Jerrie’s heart which manifested itself in snatches of song, and low, warbling, whistled notes, which sounded more as if they came from a canary’s than from a human throat.  Jerrie did not chew gum, but she whistled, and the teachers who reproved her most for what they called a boyish trick, always listened intently, when the clear, musical notes, now soft and low, now loud and shrill, were heard outside, or in the building.

‘Whistling Jerrie,’ the girls sometimes called her, but she rather liked the name, and whistled on whenever she felt like it.