Harold did not hear the last, for he was handing Jerrie into the carriage with her father, who bade him enter, too; saying they would leave him at the cottage where he wished to go as soon as possible.  There was no time for much conversation before the cottage was reached, and Harold alighted at the gate, and no allusion whatever had been made to Jerrie’s changed relations until Harold stood looking at her as she kept her seat by her father and made no sign of an intention to stop.  Then he said, as calmly as he could: 

‘Do you stay at the Park House altogether now?’

‘Oh, no,’ she answered quickly.  ’I have been there a great deal with Maude, but am coming home to-night.  I could not leave grandma alone, you know.’

She acknowledged the home and the relationship still, and Harold’s face flushed with a look of pleasure, which deepened in intensity when Arthur, with a wave of the hand habitual to him, said: 

’I must keep her now that you are here to see to the grandmother, but will let you have her to-night.  Come up later, if you like, and walk home with her.’

‘I shall be most happy to do so,’ Harold said, and then the carriage drove away, while he went in to his grandmother, who had not attended the funeral, but who knew that he had returned and was waiting for him.

CHAPTER LI.

UNDER THE PINES WITH HAROLD.

It seemed to Harold that it had been a thousand years since he had left Shannondale, so much had come into and so much had gone out of his life since he said good-bye to the girl he loved and to the girl who loved him.  One was dead, and he had only come in time to help lay her in her grave; while the other, the girl he loved, was, some might think, farther removed from him than death itself could have removed her.

But Harold did not feel so.  He had faith in Jerrie—­that she would not change, though there had been a time during the first homesick weeks in Tacoma, when, knowing from his grandmother of her convalescence, and still hearing from her no explanation with regard to the diamonds, which he knew a few still suspected him of having taken, in his impatience and humiliation he had cried out, ’Jerrie has forgotten.  She is not standing by me, forever and ever, amen, as she once promised to do.’  But this feeling quickly passed, and there came a day when he read the judge’s letter in the privacy of his room at the Tacoma, and rejoiced with an exceeding great joy for Jerrie, whose house and birthright had been so strangely restored.  He never doubted the story for a moment, but felt rather as if he had known it always, and wondered how any one could have imagined for a moment that blue-eyed, golden-haired Jerrie was the child of the dark, coarse looking woman found dead beside her.  ’I am so glad for Jerrie,’ he said, without a thought that her relations to himself would in any way be changed.