horse to the
care of a boy and to leap upon the train as it was moving away.

Meanwhile Tom walked on with Jerrie to the cottage, where he would have
stopped if she had not said to him:

'I would ask you to come in, but my head is aching so badly that I must
go straight to bed. Good-bye, Tom,' and she offered him her hand, a most
unusual thing for her to do on an ordinary occasion like this.

What ailed her, Tom wondered, that she spoke so kindly to him and looked
at him so curiously? Was she sorry for her decision, and did she wish to
revoke it?

'Then, by Jove, I'll give her a chance, for every time I see her I find
myself more and more in love,' Tom thought, as he left her and started
for the station after Beaver, whom he found hitched to a post and pawing
the ground impatiently.

Mrs. Crawford was in the garden when Jerrie entered the house, and thus
there was no one to see her as she hurried up stairs and hid the leather
bag away upon a shelf in her dressing-room. First, however, she took out
two of the papers and read them again, as if to make assurance doubly
sure; then she tried the little key to the lock, which it fitted
perfectly.

'There is no mistake,' she whispered; 'but I can't think about it now,
for this terrible pain in my head. I must wait till Harold comes home;
he will tell me what to do, and be so glad for me. Dear Harold; his days
of labor are over, and grandmother's, too. Those diamonds are a fortune
in themselves, and they are _mine_! my own! she said so! Oh, mother, I
have found you at last, but I can't make it real; my head is so strange.
What if I should be crazy?' and she started suddenly. 'What if that
dreadful taint should be in my blood, or what if I should die just as I
have found my mother! Oh, Heaven, don't let me die; don't let me lose my
reason, and I will try to do right; only show me what right is.'

She was praying now upon her knees with her throbbing head upon the side
of the bed, into which she finally crept with her clothes on, even to
her boots, for Jerrie was herself no longer. The fever with which for
days she had been threatened, and which had been induced by over-study
at Vassar, and the excitement which had followed her return home, could
be kept at bay no longer, and when Mrs. Crawford, who had seen her enter
the house, went up after a while to see why she did not come down to
tea, she found her sleeping heavily, with spots of crimson upon her
cheeks, while her h