eys,' and he proceeded
to unlock the door.

But Jerrie held back.

'No,' she said, as she glanced in at the silent, deserted rooms. 'It is
like a grave. The ruling spirit is gone.'

'But you forget Gretchen. She is here, and one of Arthur's last
injunctions was that I should visit her every day, and tell her he was
coming back. I have not seen her this morning. Come.'

He was leading her now by the waist through the front parlor, where the
furniture in its white shrouds looked like ghosts, and the pictures were
covered with tarletan. It was dark, too, in the Gretchen room, as they
called it now, but Frank threw open the blinds and let in a flood of
light upon the picture, before which Jerrie stood reverently, and with
feelings such as she had never experienced before, as she looked upon
that lovely, girlish face.

A new idea had taken possession of Jerrie since she had last seen that
picture, and while, unsuspected by her, Frank was studying first her
features and then those of Gretchen, she was struggling frantically with
the past, which seemed clearer than before. Again she saw the low room
far away--the tall stove in the corner, the dark woman opening the door,
the firelight on the white face in the chair; and this time memory added
another item to the picture, and she of the white face and wavy golden
hair seemed to hold a writing-desk on her lap and a piece of paper on
which the pale hands were tracing words slowly and feebly, as if the
effort were a pain.

'Oh, I can almost remember,' she whispered, just as Frank's voice broke
the spell by saying:

'Good-morning, Gretchen. Arthur is in California, but he is surely
coming back; he bade me tell you so.'

'Is he crazy as well as Mr. Arthur? Are we all crazy together?' Jerrie
asked herself, as she watched him closing the blinds and shutting out
the sunlight from the room, so that the picture was in shadow now and
seemed nothing but bits of colored glass.

'I have kept my promise to Arthur; and now for Maude,' Frank said, and
Jerry was conscious of a new and strange sensation--a feeling of
ownership and possession, as she went through the broad hall, glancing
in at one handsome room after another, until she reached Maude's door.

On the threshold she met Mrs. Frank, just coming out, and elegantly
attired in a tasteful muslin wrapper, with more lace and embroidery upon
it than Jerrie had ever worn in her life; her hair was carefully dressed
with a cap which