Jerrie had seen Dick twice since her refusal of him, and both times her manner, exactly like what it had always been to him, had put him at his ease, so that a looker-on would never have dreamed of that episode under the pines when she nearly broke his heart.  Billy, however, was more conscious.  He had not seen Jerrie since he took her home in his dog-cart, and his face was scarlet and his manner nervous and constrained as he stood before her, longing and yet not daring to fan her with his hat just as Tom was doing.

Of the three young men who had sought her hand, Billy’s wound was the deepest, and Billy would remember it the longest; for, mingled with his defeat, was a sense of mortification and hatred of his own personal appearance, which he could not help thinking had influenced Jerrie’s decision.  ‘And I don’t blame her, by Jove!’ he said to himself a hundred times.  ’She could not marry a pigmy, and I was a fool to hope it; but I shall love her just the same as long as I live, and if I can ever help her I will.’

And when at last Jerrie was better, and assured him so with her own sweet graciousness of manner, and put her hand upon his shoulder to steady herself as she stood up, he felt that paradise was opening to him again, and that although he had lost Jerrie as a wife, he still had her as a friend, which was more than he had dared expect.

‘Are you better now?  Can you walk to the house?’ Tom asked.

‘Oh, yes; I can walk.  The giddiness is gone,’ Jerrie replied.  ’I don’t quite know what ails me this morning.’

Never before could she remember having felt as she did now, with that sharp pain in her head, that buzzing in her ears, and more than all, that peculiar state of mind which she called “spells,” and which seemed to hold her now, body and soul.  Even when she returned to Maude’s room, and sat down beside her couch, her thoughts were far away, and everything which had ever come to her concerning her babyhood came to her now, crowding upon her so fast that once it seemed to her that the top of her head was lifting, and she put up her hand to hold it in its place.  And still she staid on with Maude, although two or three times she arose to go, but something kept her there—­chance, if one chooses to call by that name the something which at times moulds us to its will and influences our whole lives.  Something kept her there until the morning was merged into noon and the noon into the middle of the afternoon, and then she could stay no longer.  The hour had come when she must go, for the other force which was to be the instrument in changing all her future was astir, and she must go to keep her unconscious appointment with it.

CHAPTER XL.

‘DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?’

Judging from the result, this question might far better have been put to rather than by Peterkin, as he stood puffing, and hot, and indignant in the Tramp House, looking down upon Jerrie, who was sitting upon the wooden bench, with her aching head resting upon a corner of the old table standing against the wall just where it stood that stormy night fifteen years ago, when death claimed the woman beside her, but left her unharmed.