was so lovely,
and we rented a house which an Englishman had bought and made over. Such
a pretty house it was, too, with so many flowers and vines around it.'

'And the picture--did it belong to the Englishman?' Jerrie asked.

'Oh, no,' Marian replied: 'it did not seem to belong to anybody. Mr.
Carter--that was the name of our landlord--said it was there in the wall
when he took the house, which was then very small and low, with only two
or three rooms. He bought it because of the situation, which, though
very quiet and pleasant, was so near the Kursaal that we could always
hear the music without going to the garden.

'Yes,' Jerrie said again, with her head on one side, and her ear turned
up, as if she were listening to some far-off, forgotten strains. 'Yes;
and the picture was like me, you say--how like me?'

'Every way like you,' Marian replied; 'except that the original must
have been younger when it was taken--sixteen, perhaps--and she was
smaller than you, and wore a peasant's dress, and was knitting on a
bench under a tree, with the sunshine falling around her, and at a
little distance a gentleman stood watching her. But what is the matter,
Miss Crawford? Are you sick?' Marian asked, suddenly, as she saw the
bright color fade for an instant from Jerrie's face, leaving it deathly
white, while Tom and Dick knocked their heads together in their efforts
to get her a glass of water, which they succeeded in spilling into her
lap.

'It is nothing,' Jerrie said, recovering herself quickly. 'I have been
in the hot sun a good deal to-day, and perhaps that affected me and made
me a little faint. 'It has passed now;' and she looked up as brightly as
ever.

'It's that confounded washing!' Tom thought; but Jerrie could have told
him differently.

As Marian had talked to her of the house in Wiesbaden and the picture on
the wall--of the peasant girl knitting in the sunshine--she had seen, as
by revelation, through a rift in the clouds which separated her from the
past--the picture on the wall, in its pretty Florentine frame, and knew
that it resembled the pale, sweet face which came to her so often and
was so real to her. Was it her old home Marian was describing? Had she
lived there once, when the house consisted of only two or three rooms?
and was that a picture of her mother, left there she knew not how or
why? These were the thoughts crowding each other so fast in her brain
when the faintness and pallor crept over her