hed like lightning
through her brain, making her so weak that she grasped Arthur's arm to
steady herself as she tried to speak composedly.

'You are white as your dress,' he said. 'It is this confounded hot room;
let us sit nearer the window.'

They sat down together on a sofa, and taking up a newspaper, Arthur
fanned Jerrie gently, while she said to him:

'Do you really think I look like Gretchen?'

'Yes; except that you are taller. You might be her daughter.'

'Had she--had Gretchen a daughter?' was Jerrie's next question, put
hesitatingly.

'None that I ever heard of,' Arthur replied. 'Why do you ask that?'

'And her name when a girl was Marguerite Heinrich, was it not?' Jerrie
went on.

'Yes. Who told you that?' Arthur said.

'I saw it on a letter which you gave me to post years ago, when I was a
child,' Jerrie replied. 'You never received an answer to that letter,
did you?'

'What letter did you post for me to Marguerite Heinrich? I don't know
what you mean,' Arthur said, the old worried look settling upon his
face, which always came there when he was trying to recall something he
ought to remember.

As he grew older he seemed to be annoyed when told of things he had
forgotten, and as the letter had evidently gone entirely from his mind,
Jerrie said no more of it. _She_ remembered it well; and never dreaming
that it had not been posted, she had watched a long time for an answer,
which never came. Gretchen was dead; that was settled in her mind. But
who was she? With the words, 'What if it were so?' still buzzing in her
brain, the answer to this question was of vital importance to her, and
after a moment, she continued, as if she had all the time been talking
of Gretchen:

'She was Marguerite Heinrich when a girl in Wiesbaden, but she had
another name afterward, when she was married.'

'You are talking of something you know nothing about. Can't you let
Gretchen alone?' Arthur said, petulantly, and springing up he began to
pace the room in a state of great excitement, while Jerrie sat
motionless, with a white, stony look on her face and a far off look in
her eyes, as if she were seeing in a vision things she could not retain,
they passed to rapidly before her, and were so hazy and indistinct.

The likeness she had seen in the glass was gone now. She was not like
Arthur at all; it was madness in her to have thought so. And she was not
like Gretchen either. Her mother was lying under the little pine t