The first time Frank witnessed this piece of acting was on a Saturday afternoon, when he had come to the cottage as usual to pay his weekly due.  Both Mrs. Crawford and Harold were gone, but knowing they would soon return, as it was not their habit to leave Jerry long alone he sat down to wait, while she went back to the corner in the kitchen, which she used as her play-house.

‘Somebody is sick and I am taking care of her,’ she said to Mr. Tracy, who watched her through the pantomime of the death scene with a feeling, when it was over, that he had seen Gretchen die.

There was not a shadow of doubt in his mind that the sick woman was Gretchen, the nurse the stranger found in the Tramp House, and the doll baby the little girl upon whose memory that scene had been indelibly stamped, and who, with her wonderful powers of imitation, could rehearse it in every particular.  To herself she always spoke in German, which no one could understand sufficiently to make out what she meant.  Once Mr. St. Claire suggested to Frank that he take her to his brother, to whom German was as natural as English, and who might be able to learn something of her antecedents.  And Frank had answered that he would do so, knowing the while that nothing could tempt him to bring her and his brother together until all the recollections of her babyhood, if she had any, were obliterated, and she had in part forgotten her own language.

His first step in evil doing had to be followed by others until he was so far committed that he could not retrace his steps, and two shadows were with him constantly now, one always reproaching him for what he had done, and the other telling him it was now too late to turn back.

He was very fond of Jerry, and on the Saturday afternoon when he sat watching her strange play, noticing how graceful was every movement, and how lovely the constantly varying expression of her face—­from concern and anxiety when she was the nurse to distress and pain and then resignation and quietude in death when she took the role of the sick woman—­he felt himself moved by some mighty influence to right her at once and put her in her proper place.

’It is more than I can bear.  I can’t even look Dolly straight in the eye,’ he said to his evil shadow, which answered back.

’You know nothing sure.  Will you give up your prospects for a photograph and a likeness which may be accidental?’

So his conscience was smothered again; but he would question the child, and after her play was over he called her to him and taking her in his lap, kissed the little grave face upon which the shadow of the scene she had been enacting had left its impress.

‘Jerry,’ he said, ’that lady who just died in the bed with the cap on was your mamma, was it not?’

‘’Ess,’ was Jerry’s reply, for she still adhered to her first pronunciation of the word.

‘And the other was the nurse?’