Mrs. Crawford was in the garden when Jerrie entered the house, and thus there was no one to see her as she hurried up stairs and hid the leather bag away upon a shelf in her dressing-room.  First, however, she took out two of the papers and read them again, as if to make assurance doubly sure; then she tried the little key to the lock, which it fitted perfectly.

‘There is no mistake,’ she whispered; ’but I can’t think about it now, for this terrible pain in my head.  I must wait till Harold comes home; he will tell me what to do, and be so glad for me.  Dear Harold; his days of labor are over, and grandmother’s, too.  Those diamonds are a fortune in themselves, and they are mine! my own! she said so!  Oh, mother, I have found you at last, but I can’t make it real; my head is so strange.  What if I should be crazy?’ and she started suddenly.  ’What if that dreadful taint should be in my blood, or what if I should die just as I have found my mother!  Oh, Heaven, don’t let me die; don’t let me lose my reason, and I will try to do right; only show me what right is.’

She was praying now upon her knees with her throbbing head upon the side of the bed, into which she finally crept with her clothes on, even to her boots, for Jerrie was herself no longer.  The fever with which for days she had been threatened, and which had been induced by over-study at Vassar, and the excitement which had followed her return home, could be kept at bay no longer, and when Mrs. Crawford, who had seen her enter the house, went up after a while to see why she did not come down to tea, she found her sleeping heavily, with spots of crimson upon her cheeks, while her hands, which moved incessantly, were burning with fever.  Occasionally she moaned and talked in her sleep of the Tramp House, and rats, and Peterkin, who had struck the blow and knocked something or somebody down, Mrs. Crawford could not tell what, unless it were Jerrie herself, on whose forehead there was a bunch the size now of a walnut.

‘Jerrie, Jerrie,’ Mrs. Crawford cried in alarm, as she tried to remove the girl’s clothes.  ’What is it, Jerrie?  What has happened?  Who hurt you?  Who struck the blow?’

‘Peterkin,’ was the faint response, as for an instant Jerrie opened her eyelids only to close them again and sink away into a heavier sleep or stupefaction.  It seemed the latter, and as Mrs. Crawford could not herself go for a physician, and as no one came down the lane that evening, she sat all night, by Jerrie’s bed, bathing the feverish hands and trying to lessen the lump on the forehead, which, in spite of all her efforts, continued to swell until it seemed to her it was as large as a hen’s egg.

‘Did Peterkin strike you, and what for?’ she kept asking; but Jerrie only moaned and muttered something she could not understand, except once when she said, distinctly: 

’Yes, Peterkin.  Such a blow; it was like a blacksmith’s hammer, and knocked the table to pieces.  I am glad he did it.’