just to listen to you, and will keep her from being so
lonely; so offer your services if she does not ask for them--that's a
good boy.'

Then, as she remembered how weak Maude was, mentally, she thought:

'He never can be happy with her as she is now. A girl who cannot do a
sum in simple fractions, and who, when abroad, thought only of Rome as a
good place in which to buy sashes and ribbons, and who asked me in a
letter to tell her who all those Caesars were, and what the Forum was
for, is not the wife for a man like Harold, and however much he might
love her at first he would be sure to tire of her after a while, unless
he can bring her up. Possibly he can.'

Resuming her pen, she wrote:

'Don't give her all sentimental poetry and love trash, but something
solid--something historical, which she can remember and talk about with
you.'

In his third letter to Jerrie, after the receipt of her instructions,
Harold wrote as follows:

'I have offered my services as reader, and tried the solid on Maude as
you advised--have read her fifty pages of Grote's History of Greece; but
when I got as far as Homeric Theogony, she looked piteously at me, while
with Hesiod and Orpheus she was hopelessly bewildered, and by the time I
reached the extra Hellenic religion she was fast asleep! I do not
believe her mind is strong enough to grapple with those old Greek chaps;
at all events they worry her, and tire her more than they rest. So I
have abandoned the gods and come down to common people, and am reading
to her Tennyson's poems. Have read the May Queen four times, until I do
believe she knows it by heart. She has a great liking for the last
portion of it, especially the lines:

"I shall not forget you, mother:
I shall hear you when you pass,
With your feet above my head
In the long and pleasant grass."

'I saw her cry one day when I read that to her. Poor little Maude! She
is very frail, but no one seems to think her in danger, she has so
brilliant a color, and always seems so bright.'

Jerrie read this letter two or three times, and each time with an
increased sense of comfort. No man who really loved a girl could speak
of her mental weakness to another as Harold had spoken of Maude's to
her, and it might be after all that he merely thought of her as a
friend, whom he had always known. So the cloud was lifted in part, and
she only felt a greater anxiety for Maude's health, which as the spring
advanced, grew st