’Have you been lonesome, Gretchen, and are you glad to have me back again!  Poor little Gretchen!’ And now he turned to Jerrie, who was pale to the lips, and said:  ’It all came to me on the top of those mountains about Gretchen—­who she was, and how I forgot her so long—­that is the strangest of all; and, Cherry,’ here his voice dropped to a whisper, ’I know for sure that Gretchen is dead—­that came to me, too.’

‘Yes, Gretchen is dead,’ Jerrie answered him, with the sound of a sob in her own voice, while her hands tightened their grasp on his shoulder, as she went on; ’I have had a message from Gretchen, and that is why we sent for you.’

Jerrie’s hands were not strong enough to hold him then, and, wrenching himself from her, he stood confronting her with a look more like that of a maniac than any she had ever seen in him before, and which might have frightened one with nerves less strong than Jerrie’s.  But she was not afraid, and a strange calmness fell upon her, now that she had actually reached a point where she must act, and her eyes, which looked so steadily into Arthur’s, held them fast, even while he interrogated her rapidly.

’A message from Gretchen!  How, when, and where is it?  Give it to me quick, or tell me about it?  Where is she, and when is she coming?’

‘Never!’ answered Jerrie sadly.  ‘I told you she was dead.  But sit here,’ and she motioned him to a large cushioned chair.  ’Sit here and let me tell you what I know of Gretchen.’

Something in the girl’s manner mastered him and made him a child in her hands.

Sinking into the chair, pale and panting with excitement, he leaned his head back wearily, and closing his eyes, said to her: 

‘Begin.  What did Gretchen write?’

Jerrie felt that she could not stand all through the interview, and bringing a low ottoman to Arthur’s side, seated herself upon it just where she could look into his face and detect every change in it.

‘Let me tell you of Gretchen as she was when you first knew her,’ she said, ’and then you will be better able to judge of the truth of all I know.’

He did not reply, and she went on: 

’Gretchen was very young—­sixteen or seventeen—­when you first saw her knitting in the sunshine under the trees in Wiesbaden, and very beautiful, too—­so beautiful that you went again and again to look at her and talk to her, until you came to love her very much, and told her so at last; but you seemed so much above her that she could not believe you at first.  At last, however, you made her understand, and when her mother died suddenly—­’

‘Her mother was Mrs. Heinrich, and kept a kind of fancy store,’ Arthur interposed, as if anxious that nothing should be omitted.

‘Yes, she kept a fancy store,’ Jerrie rejoined; ’and when she died suddenly and left Gretchen alone, you said to her, “We must be married at once,” and you were, in the little English chapel, by the Rev. Mr. Eaton, who was then rector.’  Here Arthur’s eyes opened wide and fixed themselves wonderingly upon Jerrie, as he said: