tter in the privacy of his room at the Tacoma, and rejoiced with an
exceeding great joy for Jerrie, whose house and birthright had been so
strangely restored. He never doubted the story for a moment, but felt
rather as if he had known it always, and wondered how any one could have
imagined for a moment that blue-eyed, golden-haired Jerrie was the child
of the dark, coarse looking woman found dead beside her. 'I am so glad
for Jerrie,' he said, without a thought that her relations to himself
would in any way be changed.

Once, when she had told him of the fancies which haunted her so often,
he had put them from him with a fear that, were they true, Jerrie would
be lost to him forever. But he had no such misgivings now; and when
Jerrie's letter came, urging his return, both for her own sake and
Maude's, he wrote a few hurried lines to her, telling her how glad he
was for her, and of his intention to start for the East as soon as
possible. 'To-morrow, perhaps,' he wrote, 'in which case I may be there
before this letter reaches you, for the mails are sometimes slow, and
the judge's communication was overdue three or four days.'

Starting the second day after his letter, Harold travelled day and
night, while something seemed beckoning him on--Maude's thin, white
face, and Jerrie's, too; and when, between St. Paul and Chicago, there
came a detention from a freight car off the track, he felt that he must
fly, so sure was he that he was wanted and anxiously looked for at Tracy
Park, where at that very time Maude was dying. The next afternoon he
left Chicago, and with no further accident reached Shannondale just as
the long procession was winding its way to the cemetery.

He had heard from an acquaintance in Springfield that Maude was dead,
and of her request that he should be one of the pall-bearers, together
with Dick, and Fred, and Billy. 'And I will do it yet,' he said, with a
throb of pain, as he thought of the little girl who had died believing
that he loved her. Once or twice he had resolved to write and tell her
as carefully as possible of her mistake, but as often had changed his
mind, thinking to wait until she was better; and now she was dead, and
the chance for explanation gone forever; but he would, if possible,
carry out the wish she had expressed with regard to himself.

Striking into the fields from the station, he reached the cemetery in
time to take his place by Billy and carry poor little Maude to her last