He did not know at all what she meant, but at the mention of Maude he groaned involuntarily, as the white face came up before him again and the eyes looked into his, fuller far of love and tenderness than those confronting him so steadily, with no consciousness of his real meaning in them.

‘Those diamonds have caused me a great deal of trouble,’ he began again, ’and will cause me more unless you tell me where you found them.  Try and think.  Was it in the Tramp House?’

That started her at once, and she began to rave of the Tramp House, and the rat-hole, and the table, and Peterkin, who dealt the blow.  The bruise on her head had not proved so serious as was at first feared, and with her tangled hair falling over her face Harold had not noticed it.  But he looked at it now and questioned her of it, and asking if Peterkin had struck her there.

‘No,’ she said, and began the senseless babbling of rat-holes, and table-legs and bags, and diamonds until Harold became alarmed and went for his grandmother.

There was nothing to be learned from Jerrie in her present condition, and so Harold started for the Tramp House to see what that would tell him.  The table was still upon the floor, with the three legs piled upon it, while the fourth one was missing.  But Harold found it at last; for, remembering what Jerrie had said of the rat-hole, he investigated that spot, and from its enlarged appearance drew his own conclusion.  Jerrie had found the diamonds there; he had no doubt of it, and he told Tom Tracy so; for, as if there was a fascination about the place for him, Tom appeared in the door-way just as Harold was leaving it.  Sitting down upon the bench where Jerrie had sat that day when Peterkin attacked her, the two young men who had been enemies all their lives, but who were now drawn together by a common sympathy and love for the same girl, talked the matter over again, each arriving at the same theory as the most probable one they could accept.

’Arthur, in a crazy fit, had secreted the diamonds, and Jerrie knew it, but possibly not where he had put them.  This accounted for her strange sickness when a child, while her finding them later on, added to other causes, would account for her sickness now.  Peterkin owns that he was blowing her up for something, and that he knocked the table down with his fist, but he swears he didn’t touch her,’ Tom said, repeating in substance all Peterkin had said to him in the train when shaking with fear of a writ.

‘And do you still mean to keep silent with regard to Jerrie?’ Tom asked.

‘Yes,’ Harold replied; ’her name must not be mentioned in connection with the diamonds.  I can’t have the slightest breath of suspicion touching Jerrie, my sister.’

‘Sister be hanged!’ Tom began savagely, then checked himself, and added with a sneering laugh:  ’Don’t try to deceive me, Hal, with your sister business.  You love Jerrie, and she loves you, and that is one reason why I hate you, or shall, when this miserable business is cleared up.  Just now we must pull together and find out where she found the diamonds, and who put them there.  To write to Uncle Arthur would do no good, though seeing him might; the last we heard he was thinking of taking the coast voyage from San Francisco to Tacoma.’