It was not difficult to find in Wiesbaden people who had remembered Gretchen and the grand marriage she had made with the rich American, who afterward abandoned her.  That was the way they worded it, and they remembered too, the little girl, Jerrine, whom, after her mother’s death, the nurse, Nannine, took to her father’s friends, since which nothing had been heard from her.  Thus, had there been in Arthur’s mind any doubt as to Jerrie’s identity, it would have been swept away; but there was none.  He had accepted her from the first as his daughter, and he always looked up to her as a child to its mother whom it fears to lose sight of.

The winter was mostly spent in Rome, where Harold and Jerrie explored every part of the city, while Arthur staid in his room talking to an unseen Gretchen, who afforded him almost as much satisfaction as the real one might have done.  In May they visited the lakes and in June drifted to Paris, where Jerrie was overjoyed to meet Nina and Dick, who were staying with the Raymonds at a charming chateau just outside the city.  Here she and Harold passed a most enjoyable week, and before she left she was made happy by something which she saw and which told her that Dick was forgetting that night under the pines, and that some day not far in the future he would find in Marian all he had once hoped to find in her.  In Paris, too, she came one day upon Ann Eliza at the Bon Marche, with silks and satins piled high around her, and two or three obsequious clerks in attendance, for La Petite Americaine, who bought so lavishly everything she saw and fancied, was well known to the tradespeople, who eagerly sought her patronage and that of my lord monsieur, who inspired them greatly with his air of importance and dignity.  Tom was enjoying himself immensely, and was really a good deal improved and a good deal in love with his little wife, whom he always addressed as Petite or Madame, and who was quite a belle and a general favorite in the American colony.  Following a fashion, which Tom was sure had been made for his benefit, she had cut off her obnoxious red hair and substituted in its place a wig of reddish brown, which for naturalness and beauty was a marvel of art and skill, and became her so well that Tom really thought her handsome, or at least very stylish and stunning, which was better than mere beauty.  They had a suite of rooms at the Continental, and there Harold and Jerrie dined with them in their private parlor, for Tom was quite too fine a gentleman to go to table d’hote with the common herd.  Ann Eliza’s grand maid, Doris, was with her still, and had come to look upon her young mistress as quite as great a personage as the Lady Augusta Hardy, whom she had ceased to quote, and who, with her mother, Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, was now in the city, attended, it was said, by a Polish count, who had an eye upon her money.  Once, when they were alone, Jerrie asked Tom when he was going home, and, with a comical twinkle in his eye, he replied, ’When I hear that my respected father-in-law has gone off with apoplexy, and not before.’  Jerrie thought this a shocking speech, but she was glad to see him so happy, and, as she told Harold, ’so much more of a man than she had ever supposed he could be.’