r seen but once before, and that when he took from it the letter in
German, a paragraph of which he had bidden her read.

'Here it is!' he said, joyfully, as he took out a sealed envelope and
held it up to Jerry. 'This is the letter which you must post to-day. I
can trust it to you.'

He gave her the letter, which she took with a beating heart and a sense
of shame and regret as she remembered her pledge to Mr. Frank Tracy. She
had promised to take him any letter which Mr. Arthur might intrust to
her care, and if she took this one from Arthur she must keep her word.

'Oh, I can't do it--I can't! It would be mean to Mr. Arthur,' she
thought; and returning him the letter, she said: 'Please post it
yourself; then you will be sure, and I might lose it, or forget. I am
careless sometimes. Don't ask me to take it.'

She was pleading with her might; but Arthur paid no heed, and only
laughed at her fears.

'I know you will not forget, and I'd rather trust you than Charles.
Surely, you will not refuse to do so small a favor for me?'

'No,' she said, at last, as she put the letter in her pocket, with the
thought that, after all, there might be no harm in showing it to Mr.
Frank, who, of course, merely wished to see it, and would not think of
keeping it.

But she did not know Frank Tracy or guess how great was his anxiety lest
any message should ever reach a friend of Gretchen, if friend there were
living. She found him in the room he called his office, where the dead
woman had lain in her coffin, and where he often sat alone thinking of
the day when the inquest was held, and when he took his first step in
the downward road, which had led him so far that now it seemed
impossible to turn back, even had he wished to do so, as he sometimes
did.

'If I had never secreted the photograph, or the book with the
handwriting, if I had shown them to Arthur, everything would have been
so different, and I should have been free,' he was thinking, when Jerry
knocked timidly at the door, rousing him from his reverie, and making
him start with a nameless tsar which was always haunting him.

'Oh, Jerry, it is you,' he said, as the little girl crossed the
threshold, and shutting the door, stood with her back against it, and
her hands behind her. 'What is it?' he asked, as he saw her hesitating.

With a quick, jerky movement of the head, which set in motion the little
rings of hair, now growing so fast, and brought his brother to his mind,