’I shall be glad when she is buried.  I have been so cold and shaky ever since they brought her here,’ he said to Charles, as, with a shiver, he drew his chair nearer to the fire and leaning back wearily in it fixed his eyes upon Gretchen’s picture smiling at him from the window, ’Dear little Gretchen,’ he said in a whisper, ’you seem so near to me now that I can almost hear your feet at the door, and your voice asking to come in.  Hush!’ and he started suddenly, as Jerry’s kicks made themselves heard even to the room where he sat.  ’Hush!  Charles, who is that banging at the door?  Surely not Maude?  They would not let her come up here.  Go and see, and send her away.’

He had forgotten that he was listening for Gretchen, and when Charles, who had opened the door cautiously and described the intruder, said to him.  ’It is that woman’s child.  Shall I let her in?  She is a pretty little thing,’ he replied, ’Let her in?  No; why should you and why is she allowed to prowl around the house?  Tell her to go away.’

So Jerry was sent away with a troubled disappointed look in her little face, and as the chill March night came on and the dark shades crept into the room and Gretchen’s picture gradually faded from sight in the gathering gloom until it seemed only a confused mixture of lead and glass, Arthur felt colder, and drearier, and more wretched than he had ever felt before.  It was a genuine case of homesickness, if one can be homesick who is in his own house, surrounded by every possible comfort and luxury.  He was tired, and sick, and disappointed, and his head was aching terribly, while thoughts of the past were crowding his brain where the light of reason seemed struggling to reinstate itself.  He was thinking of Gretchen, and longing for her so intensely that once he groaned aloud and whispered to himself: 

’Poor Gretchen!  I am so sorry for it all.  I can see it clearer now, how I left her and did not write, and I don’t know where she is, or if she will ever come; and yet, I feel as if she had come, or tidings of her.  Perhaps my letter reached her.  Perhaps she is on her way.  God grant it, and forgive me for all I have made her suffer.’

It was very still in the room where Arthur sat, for Charles had gone out, and only the occasional crackling of the coal in the grate and ticking of the clock broke the silence which reigned around him; and at last, soothed into quiet, he fell asleep and dreamed that on his door he heard again the thud of baby feet, while Gretchen’s voice was calling to him to let the baby in.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE FUNERAL AND AFTER.

Long before ten o’clock, the hour appointed for the funeral, the next morning, people began to gather at the Park House, and the avenue seemed full of them.  The news that an unknown woman had been frozen to death in the Tramp House had spread far and wide, awakening in many a curiosity to see the stranger, and discover, if possible, a likeness to some one they might have known.