’Yes, I remember that he had a fancy in his mind that Gretchen was coming; but he has had that fancy so often.  He said she was in the ship with him and on the train, but she wasn’t.  I think Gretchen is dead.’

‘Yes, she is dead,’ Jerry said, decidedly; ’but tell me all you know of the time I came.’

So Harold told her again what he knew personally of the tragedy, and all he remembered to have heard.  There was little which Jerrie did not already know, for as Harold had been a boy when it happened, he had not heard all that was said, and since that time other matters had crowded the incidents of the death and burial out of his mind.  The thing most real to him was Jerrie herself, the beautiful girl sitting by his side, astonishing him so with her mood and her questions.  He had seen her often in her spells, as he called them; when she acted her pantomimes, and talked to people whom she said she saw; but he had only thought of them as the vagaries of a peculiar mind—­a German mind his grandmother said, and he accepted her theory as the correct one.

He had never seen Jerrie as she was now, with that rapt look in her face and in her eyes, which shone with a strange light as she went on to speak of the things which sometimes came and went so fast, and which she tried in vain to retain.  It had never occurred to him that the woman he had found dead was not her mother, and he thought her crazy when she put the question to him.  But he was a man, solid and steady, with no vagaries of the brain, and not a tithe of the impetuosity and immigration of the girl, who went on to ask him if he had ever seen any one whom she resembled.

He was wondering, in a vague kind of way, how long she meant to stay there, and if the tea-cakes his grandmother was going to make for supper would be spoiled, when she asked the question, to which he replied.

’No, I don’t think I ever did, unless it is Gretchen.  You are some like her, but I suppose many German girls have her complexion and hair.’

The answer was not very reassuring, and Jerrie showed it in her fact, which was still upturned to Harold, who, looking down upon it and the earnest, wistful expression which had settled there, started suddenly as if an arrow had struck him, for he saw the likeness Jerry had seen in the glass, and taking the upturned face between both his hands, he studied it intently, while, like lightening, the possibility of the thing flashed through his brain, making him colder and fainter than Jerrie herself when she looked into the mirror.

‘What if it were so?’ he said to himself, while everything seemed slipping away from him, but mostly Jerrie, who, if it were so, would be separated from him by a gulf he could not pass; for what could the daughter of Arthur Tracy care for him, the poor boy, whose life had been one fight with poverty, and whose worn, shabby clothes, on which the full western sunlight was falling, told plainer than words of the poverty which still held him in thrall.