That summer Harold and Jerrie spent in Switzerland, with the Raymonds and St. Claires and Tracys, while Arthur went to Wiesbaden to see to the Gretchen Home, which he found so much to his taste that he remained there until Harold and Jerrie, after a trip through Austria and Germany, joined him in November, when they went again for the winter to Italy, coming back in the spring to Wiesbaden, and because Arthur would have it so, taking up their abode for a while in the Gretchen Home, which had been greatly enlarged and improved, and now held thirty deserted and homeless children.  Here, in April, Jerrie’s little boy was born, in the same room and corner where Gretchen had died, and where Arthur again went down upon his knees and said the Lord’s Prayer, to which he added a fervent thanksgiving for Jerrie spared and a baby given to him.

‘I hoped it would be a girl,’ he said, ’for then we should have called it Gretchen; but as it is a boy, suppose we name it Heinrich?’

‘No, father,’ Jerrie said decidedly, ’Baby is not to be Heinrich, or Arthur, or Harold, although I think the last the dearest name in the world,’ and she put up her hand caressingly to the brown beard of the tall young man bending over to kiss her pale face and look at his son.  ‘We will call the baby Frank Tracy.’

And so Frank Tracy was the name given to the child, who was more like its father than its mother, and whom Arthur called Tracy, which he liked better, he said, than he did Frank.

They remained in Wiesbaden until June, then went to Switzerland and Paris, and in October sailed for home, where the Park House was ready for them, with no mistress to dispute Jerrie’s rights and no master except the lawful one.  Just out of town on a grassy ridge overlooking the river, a gentleman from New York had built a pretty little cottage, which, as his wife died suddenly, he never occupied, but offered for sale, with all its furniture and appointments.

‘Let’s buy it,’ Dolly said to her husband.  ’We must go somewhere before Arthur comes home, and we can live there very respectably and economically, too.’

She was beginning to count the cost of everything now, and was almost penurious in her efforts to make their income go as far as possible.  So they bought the pretty place, which she called Ridge Cottage, but Frank did not live to occupy it.  After Tom went away and left him alone with his wife, who was not the most agreeable of companions, he failed rapidly, both in body and mind, and those who saw him walking about the house, with his white hair and bent form, would have said he was seventy rather than fifty years old.  Every day, when the weather permitted, he visited Maude’s grave, where he sometime stayed for hours looking down upon the mound talking to the insensible clay beneath.

‘I am coming soon, Maude, very soon, to be here beside you,’ he would say.  ’Everybody has gone, even to Tom, and your mother is sometimes hard upon me because of what I did.  And I am tired, and cold, and old, and the world is dark and dreary, and I am coming very soon.’