he could, with those blue eyes upon him seeming to read his inmost
thoughts:

'What letter do you mean?'

'Why, the one Mr. Arthur wrote to Gretchen, or her friends, in
Wiesbaden, and gave me to post. You took it for me to the office, and I
sat on the gate so long in the darkness waiting for you to come and tell
me you had posted it sure.'

'Oh, yes, I remember it perfectly, and how you frightened me sitting up
there so high like a goblin,' Frank answered, falteringly, his face as
crimson now as Jerrie's, and his eyes dropping beneath her gaze.

'Gretchen's friends never got that letter,' Jerrie continued.

'No, they never got it,' Frank answered, mechanically.

'If they had,' Jerrie went on, 'they would have answered it, for she had
friends there.'

Frank looked up quickly and curiously at the girl talking so strangely
to him. What had she heard? What did she know? or was this only an
outburst of insanity? She certainly looked crazy as she lay there
talking to him. He was sure of it a moment after when, as if the nature
of her thoughts had changed suddenly, she said to him:

'Yes, you have been very kind to me, you and Maude--you and Maude--and I
shan't forget it. Tell her I shan't forget it.--I shan't forget it.'

She repeated this rapidly, and was growing so wild and excited that
Frank thought it advisable to leave her. As he arose to go she looked up
pleadingly at him, and said:

'Kiss me, Mr. Tracy, please.'

Had he been struck by lightning, Frank could hardly have been more
astonished than he was at this singular request, and for a moment he
stared blankly at the girl who had made it, not because he was at all
averse to granting it, but because he doubted the propriety of the act,
even if she were crazy. But something in Jerrie's face, like Arthur's,
mastered him, and, stooping down, he kissed the parched lips through
which the breath came so hotly, wondering as he did so what Dolly would
say if she could see him, a white-haired man of forty-five, kissing a
young girl of nineteen, and that girl Jerrie Crawford.

'Thanks,' Jerrie said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. 'I
think you have been chewing tobacco, haven't you? But I sha'nt forget
it; I sha'nt forget it. I shall do right. I shall do right. Tell Maude
so; tell Maude so.'

She was certainly growing worse, Frank thought, as he went down to
confer with Mrs. Crawford as to what ought to be done, and to offer his
services. He would rem