And now there remains but little to do except to gather up the few tangled threads of our story and bring it to a close.  For another year the Raymonds and St. Claires remained abroad, and then, just before they sailed for home, there was a double wedding one morning in London, when Fred and Dick were the bridegrooms, and Marian and Nina were the brides.  Dick had not forgotten the night under the pines, but he had ceased to remember it with pain; and when he asked Marian to be his wife he told her of it, and of his old love for Jerrie, while she in turn told him of a grave among the Alps by which she had stood with an aching heart, while strangers buried from her sight forever a young artist from Boston, who, had he lived, would have made it impossible for her to be the wife of Dick St. Claire.  But Allan was dead, and Jerrie was a wife and mother, and so across the graves of a living and a dead love the two grasped hands, and, forgetting the past as far as possible, were content with the new happiness offered to them.

* * * * *

It is five years now since Harold and Jerrie came home, and toddling about the house is a little girl two years old, whom they call Gretchen, and who has all the soft beauty of the Gretchen in the picture, together with Jerrie’s stronger and more marked features.  This little girl is Arthur’s idol, and has succeeded in luring him from his den, in which, until she came, he was staying closer than ever.  Now, however, he is with her constantly, either in the house or in the grounds, or sitting under a tree holding her in his lap, while he talks his strange talk to the other Gretchen, and the child listens wonderingly, with her great blue eyes fixed upon him.

‘This is our grandchild,’ he will say, nodding to the space beside him, while little Gretchen nods too, as if she also saw a figure sitting there.  ’Our grandchild and Jerrie’s baby, and you are its grandmother.  Grandma Gretchen!  That’s funny;’ and then he laughs, and baby laughs, and says after him, lispingly, ‘Danma Detchen, that’s funny.’

Then Tracy comes up with his whip and his cart, and his straw hat hanging down his back, and Arthur points him out to the spirit Gretchen as her grandson, who, he says, is all Hastings, with a very little Tracy and not a grain of German in him, ’but very nice, very nice; and you are his grandmother, too, and I am his grandfather, whom he once called an old crazy man because I wouldn’t let him play in my room with a little alligator which his Aunt Dolly sent him from Florida.’

‘Well, you be crazy, ain’t you?’ the boy says, seating himself upon the bench and nestling his brown head against the arm of the man, who replies: 

’I don’t know whether I am or not, but if to be very happy in the companionship of the living and of the dead, and to have one as real as the other is craziness, then I am crazy.’

And then, for the hundredth time, he tells to the boy, and to the baby, too, who seems to understand the story of the carpet-bag and the little girl, their mother, whom the boy, their father, found in the Tramp House one wintry morning years ago, and carried through the snow.  And Tracy starts to his feet with dilating eyes, and says: