CHAPTER XXXIII.

AT THE PARK HOUSE.

It was six months since Jerrie had seen Frank Tracy, and even in that time he had changed so much that she noticed it at once, and looked at him wonderingly as he came quickly toward her with a smile on his haggard face, and an eager welcome in his voice, as he gave her both his hands, and told her how glad he was to see her.

His hair was very white, and she noticed how he stooped as he walked with her to the house and told her how anxiously Maude was waiting for her.

‘But she cannot talk just yet,’ he said.  ’You must do all that.  The doctor tells us there is no danger, if she is kept quiet for a few days.  Oh, Jerrie, what if I should lose Maude after all.’

They were ascending the staircase now, and Frank was holding Jerrie’s hand while she tried to comfort and reassure him, and then thanked him for the fruit and the flowers he had sent to the cottage for her the day before.

‘You are so good to me,’ she said, ’you and Mr. Arthur.  How lonely the house seems without him.’

‘Yes,’ Frank replied, though in his heart he felt his brother’s absence as a relief, for his presence was a constant reproach to him, and helped to keep alive the remorse which was always tormenting him.

The sight of Jerrie, too, was a pain, but she held a nameless fascination for him, and he was constantly wondering what she would say and do when she knew, as he was morally sure she would sometime know what he had done.  He was thinking of this now, and saying to himself, ‘She will not be as hard upon me as Arthur,’ as he led her up the stairs and stopped at the door of Arthur’s rooms.

‘Would you like to go in?’ he asked.  ‘I have the keys,’ and he proceeded to unlock the door.

But Jerrie held back.

‘No,’ she said, as she glanced in at the silent, deserted rooms.  ’It is like a grave.  The ruling spirit is gone.’

’But you forget Gretchen.  She is here, and one of Arthur’s last injunctions was that I should visit her every day, and tell her he was coming back.  I have not seen her this morning.  Come.’

He was leading her now by the waist through the front parlor, where the furniture in its white shrouds looked like ghosts, and the pictures were covered with tarletan.  It was dark, too, in the Gretchen room, as they called it now, but Frank threw open the blinds and let in a flood of light upon the picture, before which Jerrie stood reverently, and with feelings such as she had never experienced before, as she looked upon that lovely, girlish face.

A new idea had taken possession of Jerrie since she had last seen that picture, and while, unsuspected by her, Frank was studying first her features and then those of Gretchen, she was struggling frantically with the past, which seemed clearer than before.  Again she saw the low room far away—­the tall stove in the corner, the dark woman opening the door, the firelight on the white face in the chair; and this time memory added another item to the picture, and she of the white face and wavy golden hair seemed to hold a writing-desk on her lap and a piece of paper on which the pale hands were tracing words slowly and feebly, as if the effort were a pain.