‘What letter do you mean?’

’Why, the one Mr. Arthur wrote to Gretchen, or her friends, in Wiesbaden, and gave me to post.  You took it for me to the office, and I sat on the gate so long in the darkness waiting for you to come and tell me you had posted it sure.’

’Oh, yes, I remember it perfectly, and how you frightened me sitting up there so high like a goblin,’ Frank answered, falteringly, his face as crimson now as Jerrie’s, and his eyes dropping beneath her gaze.

‘Gretchen’s friends never got that letter,’ Jerrie continued.

‘No, they never got it,’ Frank answered, mechanically.

‘If they had,’ Jerrie went on, ’they would have answered it, for she had friends there.’

Frank looked up quickly and curiously at the girl talking so strangely to him.  What had she heard?  What did she know? or was this only an outburst of insanity?  She certainly looked crazy as she lay there talking to him.  He was sure of it a moment after when, as if the nature of her thoughts had changed suddenly, she said to him: 

’Yes, you have been very kind to me, you and Maude—­you and Maude—­and I shan’t forget it.  Tell her I shan’t forget it.—­I shan’t forget it.’

She repeated this rapidly, and was growing so wild and excited that Frank thought it advisable to leave her.  As he arose to go she looked up pleadingly at him, and said: 

‘Kiss me, Mr. Tracy, please.’

Had he been struck by lightning, Frank could hardly have been more astonished than he was at this singular request, and for a moment he stared blankly at the girl who had made it, not because he was at all averse to granting it, but because he doubted the propriety of the act, even if she were crazy.  But something in Jerrie’s face, like Arthur’s, mastered him, and, stooping down, he kissed the parched lips through which the breath came so hotly, wondering as he did so what Dolly would say if she could see him, a white-haired man of forty-five, kissing a young girl of nineteen, and that girl Jerrie Crawford.

‘Thanks,’ Jerrie said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.  ’I think you have been chewing tobacco, haven’t you?  But I sha’nt forget it; I sha’nt forget it.  I shall do right.  I shall do right.  Tell Maude so; tell Maude so.’

She was certainly growing worse, Frank thought, as he went down to confer with Mrs. Crawford as to what ought to be done, and to offer his services.  He would remain there that afternoon, he said, and send a servant over to be in the house during the night.

‘She is very sick,’ he said; ’but it does not seem as if her sickness could be caused wholly by that bruise on her head.  Do you think Peterkin struck her?’

‘She says so,’ was Mrs. Crawford’s reply, ’though why he should do it, I cannot guess.’

Then she added that a servant would not be necessary, as Harold would be home by seven.

‘But he may not,’ Frank replied.  ’Squire Harrington came at two, and reported that the suit was not called until so late that they would not probably get through with the witnesses to-day, so Hal may not be here, and I will send Rob anyway.’