were eager to hear all he had
to tell them of the poor little girl whose mother had been frozen to
death.

The next morning the sleigh from Tracy Park stopped before the cottage
door, and Frank, who had been to meet the coroner, alighted from it. He
was pale and haggard as he entered the room where Jerry was playing on
the floor with Harold's Maltese kitten. As he came in she looked up at
him, and, lifting her hand, swept the hair back from her forehead just
as she had done the day before when Mr. St. Claire was there. The
peculiar motion had struck the latter as something familiar, though he
could not define it; but Frank did, or in his nervous condition he
thought he did, and his knees shook so he could hardly stand as he
talked with Mrs. Crawford and told her he had come for the child, who
ought to be where her mother was until after the funeral.'

'Then she will come back again. You will not keep her. She is mine,
ain't you, Jerry?' Harold exclaimed, eagerly; while Jerry, who, with a
child's instinct scented danger from Harold's manner and associated that
danger with the strange man looking so curiously at her, sprang to her
feet, which she stamped vigorously, while she cried, ''ess, 'ess, 'ess,'
with her face all in wrinkles, and her blue eyes anything but soft and
sunny, as they usually were.

In this mood she was not much like Gretchen in the picture, but she was
like some one else whom Frank had seen in excited moods, and he grew
faint and sick as he watched her, and saw the varying expression of her
face and eyes. The way she shook her head at him and flourished her
hands was a way he had seen many times and remembered so well, and he
felt as if his heart would leap from his throat as he tried to speak to
her. A turn of the head, a gesture of the hands, a curve of the
eyelashes, a tone in the voice, seemed slight actions on which to base a
certainty; but Frank did feel certain, and his brain reeled for a second
as his thoughts leaped forward years and years until he was an old man,
and he wondered if he could bear it and make no sign.

Then, just as he had decided that he could not, the tempter suggested a
plan which seemed so feasible and fair that the future, with a secret to
guard, did not look so formidable, and to himself he said:

'It is not likely I can ever be positive; and so long as there is a
doubt, however small, it would be preposterous to give up what otherwise
must come to my children, if no