y_, which she involuntarily spoke aloud.

Low as was the utterance, it caught Arthur's ear, and grasping her
shoulder, he said:

'What was that? What did you say, and where did you learn it?'

His manner frightened her; perhaps the bumble-bees were coming out, and
she drew back from him, forgetting entirely what she had said.

'It was a German word,' he continued, 'and the accent is German, too;
can you speak it.'

Unconsciously as he talked, he dropped into that language, and Jerry
listened intently, with a strained look on her face, as if trying to
recall something which came and went, but went more than it came, if
that could be.

'I talked that once,' she said, 'when I lived with mamma; but she is
dead. Harold found her, and I put flowers on her grave.'

Half the time she was speaking in German, or trying to, and Arthur
listened in amazement, while his interest in her deepened every moment,
as he took her through the rooms and showed her 'the marble people with
nothing on them,' and the beautiful pictures which adorned his walls.

'How would you like to come and be my little girl?' he asked her at
last, when, remembering Harold and the cherries, she told him she must
go, and started toward the window as if she would make her egress as she
had come in.

'Can Harold come, too? I can't leave Harold,' she said Then, as she
caught sight of him still standing at a distance, gazing curiously up at
the window through which she had disappeared, she called out, 'Yes
Harold; I'm coming. I have seen him and everything, and he did not hurt
me. Good-bye!' and she turned toward Arthur with a little nod.

Then, before he could stop her, she sprang out upon the ladder, and went
down faster than she had come up, leaving the pail of cherries upon the
window-sill, and leaving, too, in Arthur's breast a tumult of emotions
which he could not define.

That night, when Frank, who had heard in much alarm of Jerry's visit to
his brother, went up to see him, he found him more cheerful and natural
than he had seen him in weeks. As Frank expected, his first words were
of the little girl who had come to him through the window and left him
the cherries, of which he said he had eaten so many that he feared they
might make him sick. What did Frank know of the child? What had he
learned of her history? Of course he had made enquiries everywhere?

It was just in the twilight, before the gas was lighted, and so Arthur
did not see how his