After the game was over they repaired to the piazza, where the little tables were laid for tea, and where Jerrie found herself vis-a-vis with Marian Raymond, of whom she had thought she might stand a little in awe, she had heard so much of her.  But the mesmeric power which Jerrie possessed drew the Kentucky girl to her at once, and they were soon in a most animated conversation.

‘You do not seem like a stranger to me,’ Marian said, ’and I should almost say I had seen you before, you are so like a picture in Germany.’

‘Yes,’ Jerrie answered, with a gasp, and a feeling such as she always experienced when the spell was upon her and she saw things as in a dream.

‘Was it in a gallery?’

’Oh, no; it was in a house we rented in Wiesbaden.  You know, perhaps, that I was there at school for a long time.  Then, when mamma came out, and I was through school, we stayed there for months, it was so lovely, and we rented a house which an Englishman had bought and made over.  Such a pretty house it was, too, with so many flowers and vines around it.’

‘And the picture—­did it belong to the Englishman?’ Jerrie asked.

‘Oh, no,’ Marian replied:  ’it did not seem to belong to anybody.  Mr. Carter—­that was the name of our landlord—­said it was there in the wall when he took the house, which was then very small and low, with only two or three rooms.  He bought it because of the situation, which, though very quiet and pleasant, was so near the Kursaal that we could always hear the music without going to the garden.

‘Yes,’ Jerrie said again, with her head on one side, and her ear turned up, as if she were listening to some far-off, forgotten strains.  ’Yes; and the picture was like me, you say—­how like me?’

‘Every way like you,’ Marian replied; ’except that the original must have been younger when it was taken—­sixteen, perhaps—­and she was smaller than you, and wore a peasant’s dress, and was knitting on a bench under a tree, with the sunshine falling around her, and at a little distance a gentleman stood watching her.  But what is the matter, Miss Crawford?  Are you sick?’ Marian asked, suddenly, as she saw the bright color fade for an instant from Jerrie’s face, leaving it deathly white, while Tom and Dick knocked their heads together in their efforts to get her a glass of water, which they succeeded in spilling into her lap.

‘It is nothing,’ Jerrie said, recovering herself quickly.  ’I have been in the hot sun a good deal to-day, and perhaps that affected me and made me a little faint.  ‘It has passed now;’ and she looked up as brightly as ever.

‘It’s that confounded washing!’ Tom thought; but Jerrie could have told him differently.