Maude nodded, and Jerrie continued:

'The suit comes off to-morrow, and Harold is subpoenaed as a witness, as he was in Peterkin's office a while and knows something about the arrangement between them. I am sorry he has got to swear against Peterkin; it will make him so angry, and he hates Harold now. The suit is to be called in the morning and Judge St. Claire and Harold are going to-night on the five o'clock train; and as he may be gone a day or two I must be home to see to packing his bag. But I will stay with you just as long as I can.'

She said nothing of her head which throbbed in a most peculiar way, making her dizzy and half blind as she went down to breakfast, which she took alone with Mrs. Tracy. Frank had eaten his long before, and was now pacing up and down the long piazza with his head bent forward and his hands locked together behind him.

'I shall never have rest or peace again until it is known. Oh, if it would only come out without my telling,' he said to himself, little dreaming how near it was to coming out and that before that day's sun had set Jerrie would know!

Tom seldom appeared until after ten, and when Jerrie went for a few moments into the grounds, to see if the fresh air would do her good, she found him seated in an arm-chair under a horse chestnut tree, stretching himself and yawning as if he were just out of bed.

'Jerrie, you here? Did you stay all night? If I'd known that, I'd have made an effort to come down to breakfast, though I think getting up in the morning a bore. Why, what's the matter? You look as if you were going to faint. Sit down here,' he continued, as he saw Jerrie reel forward as if she were about to fall.

He put her into the chair and stood over her, fanning her with his hat and wondering what he should do, while for a moment she lost consciousness of the things about her, and her mind went floating off after the picture on the wall in Wiesbaden, which was haunting her that morning.

When she came to herself, Tom and Dick and Billy were all three hovering around, and so close to her that without opening her eyes she could have told exactly where each one was standing, Tom by the smell of tobacco, with which his clothes were saturated, Billy by the powerful scent of white rose with which he always perfumed his handkerchief, and Dick, because, as she had once said to Nina when a child, he was so clean and looked as if he had just been scrubbed. The two young men had come to enquire for Maude, and had found Jerrie half swooning under the tree, with Tom fanning her frantically and acting like a wild man.

Jerrie had seen Dick twice since her refusal of him, and both times her manner, exactly like what it had always been to him, had put him at his ease, so that a looker-on would never have dreamed of that episode under the pines when she nearly broke his heart. Billy, however, was more conscious. He had not seen Jerrie since he took her home in his dog-cart, and his face was scarlet and his manner nervous and constrained as he stood before her, longing and yet not daring to fan her with his hat just as Tom was doing.

Of the three young men who had sought her hand, Billy's wound was the deepest, and Billy would remember it the longest; for, mingled with his defeat, was a sense of mortification and hatred of his own personal appearance, which he could not help thinking had influenced Jerrie's decision. 'And I don't blame her, by Jove!' he said to himself a hundred times. 'She could not marry a pigmy, and I was a fool to hope it; but I shall love her just the same as long as I live, and if I can ever help her I will.'

And when at last Jerrie was better, and assured him so with her own sweet graciousness of manner, and put her hand upon his shoulder to steady herself as she stood up, he felt that paradise was opening to him again, and that although he had lost Jerrie as a wife, he still had her as a friend, which was more than he had dared expect.

'Are you better now? Can you walk to the house?' Tom asked.

'Oh, yes; I can walk. The giddiness is gone,' Jerrie replied. 'I don't quite know what ails me this morning.'

Never before could she remember having felt as she did now, with that sharp pain in her head, that buzzing in her ears, and more than all, that peculiar state of mind which she called "spells," and which seemed to hold her now, body and soul. Even when she returned to Maude's room, and sat down beside her couch, her thoughts were far away, and everything which had ever come to her concerning her babyhood came to her now, crowding upon her so fast that once it seemed to her that the top of her head was lifting, and she put up her hand to hold it in its place. And still she staid on with Maude, although two or three times she arose to go, but something kept her there—chance, if one chooses to call by that name the something which at times moulds us to its will and influences our whole lives. Something kept her there until the morning was merged into noon and the noon into the middle of the afternoon, and then she could stay no longer. The hour had come when she must go, for the other force which was to be the instrument in changing all her future was astir, and she must go to keep her unconscious appointment with it.



CHAPTER XL.

'DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?'

Judging from the result, this question might far better have been put to rather than by Peterkin, as he stood puffing, and hot, and indignant in the Tramp House, looking down upon Jerrie, who was sitting upon the wooden bench, with her aching head resting upon a corner of the old table standing against the wall just where it stood that stormy night fifteen years ago, when death claimed the woman beside her, but left her unharmed.

After saying good-bye to Maude, Jerrie had walked very slowly through the park, stopping more than once to rest upon the seats scattered here and there, and wondering more and more at the feeling which oppressed her and the terrible pain in her head, which grew constantly worse as she went on.

'I'm afraid I'm going to be sick,' she said to herself. 'I never felt this way before; and no wonder, with all I have gone through the last few weeks. The getting ready for the commencement, the coming home, and all the excitement which followed, with three men, one after another, offering themselves to me, and the drenching that night in the rain, and then watching by Maude without a wink of sleep, it is enough to make a behemoth sick, and I am so dizzy and hot—'

She had reached the Tramp House by this time, and, feeling that she could go no farther without resting herself, she went in, and seating herself upon the bench, laid her tired, aching head upon the table, and felt again for a few moments that strange sensation as if the top of her head were rising up and up until she could not reach it with her hand, for she tried, and thought of Ann Eliza, with her hair piled so high on her head.

'The loss of an inch or two might improve me,' she said, though I'd rather keep my scalp.'

Then she seemed to be drifting away into the realms of sleep, and all around her were confusion and bewilderment. The window, across which the woodbine was growing, changed places with the door; the floor rose up and bowed to her, while the room was full of faces, beckoning to and smiling upon her. Faces like the one she knew so well, the pale face in the chair; faces like her own, as she remembered it when a child; faces like the dark woman dead so long ago and buried in the Tracy lot, and faces like Arthur's as she had seen him oftenest, when he spoke so lovingly, and called her little Cherry. Then the scene changed, and the old Tramp House was full of wondrous music, which came floating in at every crevice and through the open door and windows, while she listened intently in her dreams as the grand chorus went on. It as was if Arthur, from the top of the highest peak beyond the Rocky Mountains, and Gretchen, from her lonely grave in far-off Germany, were calling to each other across two continents, their voices meeting and mingling together in the Tramp House in a jubilistic strain, now wild and weird like the cry of the dying woman looking out into the stormy night, now soft and low as the lullaby a fond mother sings to her sleeping child, and now swelling louder and louder, and higher and higher, until the rafters rang with the joyous music, and the whole world outside was filled with the song of gladness.

Wake up, Jerrie! Wake from the dream of rapture to a reality far more rapturous, for the time is at hand, the hour has come, heralded by the shadow which falls over the floor as Peterkin's burly figure crosses the threshold and enters the silent room.

After Peterkin's conversation with his son concerning his future wife, Jerrie had grown rapidly in the old man's favor. It is true she had neither name nor money, the latter of which was scarcely necessary in this case, but he was not insensible to the fact that she possessed other qualities and advantages which would be a help to the house of Peterkin in its efforts to rise. No girl in the neighborhood was more popular or more sought after than Jerrie, or more intimate with the big-bugs, as he styled the St. Claires, and Athertons, and Tracys. Jerrie would draw; Jerry would boost; and he found himself forming many plans for the young couple, who were to occupy the south wing; and in fancy he saw Arthur at Le Bateau half the time at least, while the rest of the time the carriages from Grassy Spring, and Brier Hill, and Tracy Park, were standing under the stone arch in front of the door. How, then, was he disappointed, and enraged, too, when told by his son that Jerrie had refused him?

Peterkin had been in Springfield nearly a week, and after his return home had waited a little before broaching the subject to his son; so that it was not until the morning before the day of the lawsuit that he learned the truth by closely questioning Billy, who shielded and defended Jerrie as far as possible.

'Not have you! Refused you! Don't love you! Don't care for money! Thunderation! What does the girl mean? Is she crazy? Is she a fool? Is she in love with some other idiot?'

'I th-think so, yes; th-though it did not occur to me then,' Billy answered, very meekly; 'and if so she ca-can't care for me any mo-more that I ca-can care for any other girl.'

'And you are a fool, too,' was the affectionate rejoinder. 'I'll be dummed if you ain't a pair! Who is the lucky man? Not that dog Harold, who is goin' to swear agin' us to-morrow? If it is, I b'lieve I'll shoot him.'

'Father,' Billy cried in alarm, 'be quiet; if I can st-stand it, you can.'

But Peterkin swore he wouldn't stand it. He'd do something, he didn't know what; and all the morning he went about the house like a madman, swearing at his wife, because she wasn't up to snuff, and couldn't hoe her own with the 'ristocrats; swearing at Billy because he was a fool, and so small that 'twas no wonder a bean-pole like Jerrie wouldn't look at him, and swearing at Ann Eliza because her hair was so red, and because she had sprained her ankle for the sake of having Tom Tracy bring her home, hoping he would keep calling to see her, and thus give her a chance to rope him in, which she never could as long as the world stood.

'Neither you nor Bill will ever marry, with all your money, unless you take up with a cobbler, and he with a washwoman,' was his farewell remark, as he finally left the house about three o'clock and started for the village, where he had some of his own witnesses to see before taking the train for Springfield at five.

His wife had ventured to suggest that he go in a carriage, as it was so warm, but he had answered, savagely:

'Go to thunder with your carriage and coat-of-arms! What good have they ever done us only to make folks laugh at us for a pack of fools? Nothing under heaven gives us a h'ist, and I'm just goin' to quit the folderol and pad it on foot, as I used to when I was cap'n of the 'Liza Ann—durn it!'

And so, with his bag in his hand, he started rapidly down the road in the direction of Shannondale. But the sun was hot, and he was hot, and his bag was heavy, and, cursing himself for a fool that he had not taken the carriage, he finally struck into the park as a cooler, if a longer, route to the station.

As he came near the Tramp House, which gave no sign of its sleeping occupant, something impelled him to look in at the door. And this he did with a thought of Jerrie in his heart, though with no suspicion that she was there; and when he saw her he started suddenly, and uttered an exclamation of surprise, which roused her from her heavy slumber.

'Oh!' she exclaimed, shedding back her golden hair from her flushed face and lifting her eyes to him; but whatever else she might have said was prevented by his outburst of passion, which began with the question:

'Do you know what you have done?'

Jerrie looked at him wonderingly, but made no reply, and he went on:

'Yes, do you know what you have done?—you, a poor, unknown girl, who, but for the Tracys, would have gone to the poor-house sure as guns, where you orter have gone! Yes, you orter. You refuse my Bill! you, who hain't a cent to your name; and all for that sneak of a Harold, who will swear agin me to-morrer. I know he's at the root on't, though Bill didn't say so, and I hate him wuss than pizen; he, who has been at the wheel in my shop and begged swill for a livin'! he to be settin' up for a gentleman and a cuttin' out my Bill, who will be wuth more'n a million,—yes, two millions, probably, and you have refused him! Do you hear me, gal?'

He yelled this last, for something in Jerry's attitude made him think Jerrie was not giving him her undivided attention, for she was still listening to the music, which seemed to swell higher and higher, louder and clearer, until it almost drowned the voice of the man demanding a second time so fiercely:

'Do you hear me, gal?'

'Yes, I hear you,' she said. 'You are talking of Harold, and saying things you shall not repeat in my presence.'

'Hoity-toity, miss! What's to hinder me repeatin' in your presence that Harold Hastings is a sneak and a snob, a hewer of wood, a drawer of water, and a—'

Jerrie had risen to her feet, and stood up so tall and straight that, it seemed to Peterkin as if she towered even above himself, while something in the flash of her blue eyes made him think of Arthur when he turned him from the house for accusing Harold of theft, and also of the little child who had attacked him so fiercely on that wintry morning when the dead woman lay stretched upon the table at the Park House, with her dark face upturned to the ceiling above.

'I shall hinder you,' she said, her voice ringing clear and distinct; 'and if you breathe another word against Harold, I'll turn you from this room. The Tramp House is mine; Mr. Arthur gave it to me, and you cannot stay in it with me.'

"Heavens and earth! hear the girl! One would s'pose she was the Queen of Sheby to hear her go on, instead of a beggar, whose father was the Lord only knows who, and whose mother was found in rags on this 'ere table. Drat the dum thing!" Peterkin roared, bringing his fist down with such force upon the poor old rickety table that it fell to pieces under the blow and went crashing to the floor.

Jerrie's face was a face to fear then, and Peterkin was afraid, and backed himself out of the room, with Jerrie close to him, never speaking a word, but motioning him to the door, through which he passed swiftly, and picking up his bag, walked rapidly away, growling to himself:

'There's the very Old Harry in that gal's eye. Bill did well to get shet of her; and yit, if she'd married him, how she would have rid over all their heads! Well, to be sure, what a dum fool she is!'



CHAPTER XLI.

WHAT JERRIE FOUND UNDER THE FLOOR.

Meantime Jerrie had gone back to the wreck of the table, which she tried to straighten up, handling it as carefully and as reverently as if it had been her mother's coffin she was touching. One of the legs had been broken off before, and she and Harold has fastened it on and turned it to the side of the house where it would be more out of the way of harm, and it was this leg which had succumbed first to the force of Peterkin's fist, and as the entire pressure of the table was brought to bear upon it in falling, it had been precipitated through a hole in the base board, which had been there as long as she could remember the place, not so large at first, but growing larger each year, as the decaying boards crumbled or were eaten away by rats.

Jerrie called it a rat-hole, and had several times put a trap there to catch the marauders, who sometimes scampered across her very feet, so accustomed were they to her presence. But the rats would not go into the trap, and then she pasted a newspaper over the hole, but this had been torn, and hung in shreds, while the hole grew gradually larger.

Taking up the top of the table, Jerrie dragged it to the centre of the room, and, putting three of the legs upon it, went to search for the fourth, one end of which was just visible at the aperture in the wall. As she stooped to take it out, a bit of the floor under her feet gave way, making the opening so large that the table leg disappeared from view entirely. Then Jerrie went down upon her knees, and, thrusting her hand under the floor, felt for the missing leg, striking against stones, and brushes, and bits of mortar, and finally touching something from which she recoiled for an instant, it was so cold and slimy.

But she struck it again in her search, this time more squarely, and, grasping it hard in her hand, brought it out to the light, while an undefinable thrill, half of terror, half of joy, ran through her frame, as she held it up and examined it carefully.

It was a small hand-bag of Russian leather, covered with mold and stained with the damp of its long hiding-place, while a corner of it showed that the rats had tested its properties, but, disliking either the taste or the smell had left it in quiet. And there under the floor, not two feet from where Jerrie had often played, it had lain ever since the wintry night years before when on the table a strange woman had struggled with death, and in her struggle the bag, which held so much that was important to the child beside her, had probably fallen from her rude bed into the hole just behind it, and which was then large enough to receive it. Then the rats, attracted by this novel appearance in their midst, had investigated and dragged it so far from the opening that it could not been seen unless one went down upon the floor to look for it.

This was the conviction that flashed upon Jerrie as she stood, with widely dilated eyes and quivering nostrils, staring at the bag, without the power at first to speak or move.

The music was gone now—Gretchen's voice and Arthur's—and there was only in her ears a roaring sound like the rushing of distant waters falling heavily, while the objects in the room swam around her, and she experienced again that ringing sensation as if the top of her head were leaving her. She was so sure that here at last was a message from the dead—that she had the mystery of her babyhood in her grasp—and yet, for full two minutes she hesitated and held back, until at last the sweet, pale face which had haunted her so often seemed about to touch her own with a caress which brought the hot tears to her eyes, and the spell which had bound her hands and feet was broken.

The bag was clasped, but not locked, although there was a lock, and Jerrie thought involuntarily of the little key lying with the other articles on the dead woman's person. To unclasp the bag required a little strength, for the steel was covered with rust; but it yielded at last to Jerrie's strong fingers; and the bag came open, disclosing first some square object carefully wrapped in a silk handkerchief which had been white in its day, but which now was yellow and soiled by time. At this, however, Jerrie scarcely looked, for her eye had fallen upon a package of papers lying beneath it—papers folded with care, and securely tied with a bit of faded blue ribbon.

Seating herself upon the bench where she had been sleeping when Peterkin's voice aroused her, Jerrie untied the package, and then began to read, first slowly, as if weighing every word and sentence, then faster and faster, until at last it seemed that her burning eyes, from which the hot tears were streaming like rain, fairly leaped from page to page, taking in the contents at a glance, and comprehending everything.

When she had finished, she sat for a moment rigid as a corpse, and then, with a loud, glad cry, which made the very rafters ring, and went floating out upon the summer air, "Thank Heaven, I have found my mother!" she fell upon her face, insensible to everything.

How long she lay thus she did not know, but when she came back to consciousness the sunlight had changed its position in the room, and she felt it was growing late.

Starting suddenly up, and wiping from her face a drop of blood which has oozed from a cut in her forehead caused by her striking it against some hard substance when she fell, she looked about her for a moment in a bewildered kind of way, not realizing at first what had happened; and even when she remembered, she was too much stunned and astonished to take it all in as she would afterward when she was calmer and could think more clearer.

Taking up the papers one by one, in the order in which she had found them, she tied them again with the blue ribbon, and put them into the bag.

'There was something more,' she whispered, trying to think what it was.

Then, as her eye fell upon the first package she had taken out, and which was wrapped in a silk handkerchief, she took it up, and removing the covering, started as suddenly as if a blow had been dealt her, for there was the tortoise-shell box, with its blue satin lining, and its diamonds, which seemed to her like so many sparks of fire flashing in her eyes and dazzling her with their brilliancy.

Just such a box as this, and just such diamonds as these, Mrs. Frank Tracy had lost years ago, and as Jerrie held them in her hand and turned them to the light, till they showed all the hues of the rainbow, she experienced a feeling of terror as if she were a thief and had been convicted of the theft. Then, as she remembered what she had read, she burst into a hysterical fit of laughing and crying together, and whispered to herself:

'I believe I am going mad like him.'

After a time she arose, and with the bag on her arm and the diamonds in her hand, she started for home, with only one thought in her mind:

'I must tell Harold, and ask him what to do.'

She had forgotten that he was to leave that afternoon on the train—forgotten everything, except the one subject which affected her so strongly, so that in one sense she might be said to be thinking of nothing, when, as she was walking with her head bent down, she came suddenly face to face with Harold, who, with his satchel in his hand, was starting for the train due now in a few minutes.

'Jerrie,' he exclaimed, 'how late you are! I waited until the last minute to say good-bye. Why, what ails you, and where have you been?' he continued, as she raised her head and he saw the bruise on her forehead and the strange pallor of her face.

'In the Tramp House,' the answered, in a voice which was not hers at all, and made Harold look more curiously at her.

As he did so he saw peeping from a fold of the silk handkerchief the corner of the tortoise-shell box which he remembered so well, and the sight of which brought back all the shame and humiliation and pain of that memorable morning when he had been suspected of taking it.

'What is it? What have you in your hand?' he asked.

Then Jerrie's face, so pale before, flushed scarlet, and her eyes had in them a wild look which Harold construed into fear, as, without a word, she laid the box in his hand, and then stood watching him is he opened it.

Harold's face was whiter than Jerrie's had been, and his voice trembled as he said, in a whisper:

'Mrs. Tracy's diamonds!'

'Yes, Mrs. Tracy's diamonds,' Jerrie replied, with a marked emphasis on the Mrs. Tracy.

'How came you by them, and where did you find them,' Harold asked next, shrinking a little from the glittering stones which seemed like fiery eyes confronting him.

'I can't tell you now. Put them up quick. Don't let any one see them. Somebody is coming,' Jerrie said, hurriedly, as her ear caught a sound and her eye an object which Harold neither saw nor heard as he mechanically thrust the box into his side pocket and then turned just as Tom Tracy came up on horseback.

'Hallo, Jerrie! hallo, Hal!' he cried, dismounting quickly and throwing the bridle-rein over his arm. 'And so you are off to that suit?' he continued, addressing himself to Harold. 'By George, I wish I were a witness. I'd swear the old man's head off; for, upon my soul, I believe he is an old liar?' Then turning to Jerrie, he continued: 'Are you better than you were this morning? Upon my word, you look worse. It's that infernal watching last night that ails you. I told mother you ought not to do it.'

Just then a whistle was heard in the distance; the train was at Truesdale, four miles away.

'You will never catch it,' Tom said, as Harold snatched up his bag and started to run, 'Here, jump on to Beaver, and leave him at the station. I can go there for him.'

Harold knew it was impossible for him to make time against the train, and, accepting Tom's offer, he vaulted into the saddle and galloped rapidly away, reaching the station just in time to give his 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 hands, which moved incessantly, were burning with fever. Occasionally she moaned and talked in her sleep of the Tramp House, and rats, and Peterkin, who had struck the blow and knocked something or somebody down, Mrs. Crawford could not tell what, unless it were Jerrie herself, on whose forehead there was a bunch the size now of a walnut.

'Jerrie, Jerrie,' Mrs. Crawford cried in alarm, as she tried to remove the girl's clothes. 'What is it, Jerrie? What has happened? Who hurt you? Who struck the blow?'

'Peterkin,' was the faint response, as for an instant Jerrie opened her eyelids only to close them again and sink away into a heavier sleep or stupefaction. It seemed the latter, and as Mrs. Crawford could not herself go for a physician, and as no one came down the lane that evening, she sat all night, by Jerrie's bed, bathing the feverish hands and trying to lessen the lump on the forehead, which, in spite of all her efforts, continued to swell until it seemed to her it was as large as a hen's egg.

'Did Peterkin strike you, and what for?' she kept asking; but Jerrie only moaned and muttered something she could not understand, except once when she said, distinctly:

'Yes, Peterkin. Such a blow; it was like a blacksmith's hammer, and knocked the table to pieces. I am glad he did it.'

What did she mean? Mrs. Crawford asked herself in vain, and when at last the early summer morning broke, she was almost as crazy as Jerrie, who was steadily growing worse, and who was saying the strangest things about arrests and blows, and Peterkin, and Harold, and Mr. Arthur, whose name she always mentioned with a sob and stretching out of her hands, as to some invisible presence. Help must be had from some quarter; and for two hours, which seemed to her years, Mrs. Crawford watched for the coming of someone, until at last she saw Tom Tracy galloping up on Beaver.

'Tom, Tom,' she screamed from the window, as she saw him dismounting at the gate, 'don't get off, but ride for your life and fetch the doctor, quick. Jerrie is very sick; has been crazy all night, and has a bunch on her head as big as a bowl, where she says Peterkin struck her.

'Peterkin struck Jerrie! I'll kill him!' Tom said as he tore down the lane and out upon the highway in quest of the physician, who was soon found and at Jerrie's side, where Tom stood with him, gazing awe struck upon the fever stricken girl, who was tossing and talking all the time, and whose bright eyes unclosed once and fixed themselves on him, as he spoke her name and laid his hand on one of hers.

'Oh, Tom, Tom,' she said, 'you told me you'd kill her. Will you kill her? Will you kill her?' And a wild, hysterical laugh echoed through the room, as she kept repeating the words, 'Will you kill her? Will you kill her?' which conveyed no meaning to Tom, who had forgotten what he had said he would do if a claimant to Tracy Park should appear in the shape of a young lady.

Whatever Jerrie took up she repeated rapidly until something else came into her mind, and when Mrs. Crawford, referring to the bunch on her head, said to the physician, 'Peterkin struck the blow, she says,' she began at once like a parrot. 'Peterkin struck the blow! Peterkin struck the blow!' until another idea suggested itself, and she began to ring changes on the sentence. 'In the rat-hole; in the Tramp House; in the Tramp House; in the rat-hole,' talking so fast that sometimes it was impossible to follow her.

The blow on her head alone could not have produced this state of things; it was rather over-excitement, added to some great mental shock, the nature of which he could not divine, the doctor said to Tom, who in his wrath at Peterkin was ready to flay him alive, or at least to ride him on a rail the instant he entered town.

It was a puzzling case, though not a dangerous one as yet, the physician said. Jerrie's strong constitution could stand an attack much more severe than this one; and prescribing perfect quiet, with strict orders that she should see no more people than was necessary, he left, promising to return in the afternoon, when he hoped to find her better. Tom lingered a while after the doctor had left, and showed himself so thoughtful and kind that Mrs. Crawford forgave him much which she had harbored against him for his treatment of Harold.

All night Tom's dreams had been haunted with Jerrie's voice and Jerrie's look as she gave him her hand and said, 'Good-bye, Tom,' and he had ridden over early to see if the look and tone were still there, and if they were, and he had a chance, he meant to renew his offer. But words of love would have been sadly out of place to this restless, feverish girl, whose incoherent babblings puzzled and bewildered him.

One fact, however, was distinct in his mind—Peterkin had struck her a terrible blow in the Tramp House. Of that he was sure, though why he should have done so he could not guess; and vowing vengeance upon the man, he left the cottage at last and rode down to the Tramp House, where he found the table in a state of ruin upon the door, three of the legs upon it and the other one nowhere to be seen.

'He struck her with it and then threw it away, I'll bet,' he said to himself, as he hunted for the missing leg; 'and it was some quarrel he picked with her about Hal, who is going to swear against him. Jerrie would never hear Hal abused, and I've no doubt she aggravated the wretch until he forgot himself and dealt her that blow. I'll have him arrested for assault and battery, as sure as I am born.'

Hurrying home, he told the story to his mother, who smiled incredulously and said she did not believe it, bidding him say nothing of it to Maude, who was not as well as usual that day. Then he told his father, who started at once for the cottage, where Mrs. Crawford refused to let him see Jerrie, saying that the doctor's orders were that she should be kept perfectly quiet. But as they stood talking together near the open door, Jerrie's voice was heard calling:

'Let Mr. Frank come up.'

So Frank went up, and, notwithstanding all he had heard from Tom, he was surprised at Jerrie's flushed face and the unnatural expression of her eyes, which turned so eagerly toward him as he came in.

'Oh, Mr. Tracy,' she said, as he sat down beside her and took one of her burning hands in his, 'you have always been kind to me, haven't you?'

'Yes,' he replied, with a keen pang of remorse, and wondering if she would call it kindness if she knew all that he did.

'And I think you like me some,' she continued: 'don't you?'

'Like you!' he repeated; 'yes, more than you can ever know. Why, sometimes I think I like you almost as much as I do Maude.'

As if the mention of Maude had sent her thoughts backward in a very different channel, she said abruptly, while she held his gaze steadily with her bright eyes:

'You posted that letter?'

Frank knew perfectly well that she meant the letter which, together with the photograph, and the Bible, and the lock of the baby's golden hair, had lain for years in his private drawer—the letter whose superscription he had studied so many times, and which had seldom been absent from his thoughts an hour since that night when, from her perch on the gate-post, Jerrie had startled him with the question she was asking him now. But be affected ignorance and said, as indifferently as 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 remain there that afternoon, he said, and send a servant over to be in the house during the night.

'She is very sick,' he said; 'but it does not seem as if her sickness could be caused wholly by that bruise on her head. Do you think Peterkin struck her?'

'She says so,' was Mrs. Crawford's reply, 'though why he should do it, I cannot guess.'

Then she added that a servant would not be necessary, as Harold would be home by seven.

'But he may not,' Frank replied. 'Squire Harrington came at two, and reported that the suit was not called until so late that they would not probably get through with the witnesses to-day, so Hal may not be here, and I will send Rob anyway.'

On his way home Frank, too, looked in at the Tramp House, and saw the broken-down table, and hunted for the missing leg, and with Tom concluded that something unusual had taken place there, though he could not guess what.

That evening, as Jerrie grew more and more restless and talkative, Mrs. Crawford listened anxiously for the train, and when it came, waited and watched for Harold, but watched in vain, for Harold did not come. Several of her neighbors, however, did come; those who had gone to the city out of curiosity to attend the lawsuit, and 'see old Peterkin squirm and hear him swear;' and could she have looked into the houses in the village that night, she would have heard some startling news, for almost before the train rolled away from the platform, everybody at or near the station had been told that Mrs. Tracy's diamonds, lost nine or ten years ago, had been found in Harold Hastings' pocket, and that he was under arrest.

Such news travels fast, and it reached the Park House just as the family were finishing their late dinner.

'I told you so! I always thought he was guilty, or knew something about them,' Mrs. Frank exclaimed, with a look of exultation on her face as she turned to her husband. 'What do you think now of your fine young man, who has been hanging around here after your daughter until she is half-betwaddled after him?'

Frank's face was very grave as he answered, decidedly:

'I do not believe it. Harold Hastings never took your diamonds.'

'How came he by them, then?' she asked, in a loud, angry voice.

'I don't know,' her husband replied; 'there is some mistake; it will be cleared in time. But keep it from Maude; I think the news would kill her.'

Meantime Tom had sat with his brows knit together, as if intently thinking; and when at last he spoke he said to his father:

'I shall go to Springfield on the ten o'clock train, and you'd better go with me.'

To this Frank made no objections. If his wife's diamonds were really found, he ought to be there to receive them; and, besides, he might say a word in Harold's defence, if necessary. So ten o'clock found him and Tom at the station, where also was Dick St. Claire, with several other young men, pacing up and down the platform and excitedly discussing the news, of which they did not believe a word.

'I almost feel as if they were hurting me when they touch Hal, he's such a noble fellow,' Dick said to Mr. Tracy and Tom. 'We are all as mad as can be, and so a lot of us fellows, who have always known him, are going over to speak a good word for him, and go his bail if necessary. I don't believe, though, they can do anything after all these years; but father will know. He is there with him.'

And so the night train to Springfield carried fourteen men from Shannondale, thirteen of whom were going to stand by Harold, while the fourteenth hardly knew why he was going or what he believed. Arrived in the city, their first inquiry was for Harold, who, instead of being in the charge of an officer as they had feared, was quietly sleeping in his room at the hotel, while Judge St. Claire had the diamonds in his possession.



CHAPTER XLII.

HAROLD AND THE DIAMONDS.

When Harold sprang upon the train as it was moving from the station and entered the rear car, he found old Peterkin near the door, button-holing Judge St. Claire, to whom he was talking loudly and angrily of that infernal cheat, Wilson, who had brought the suit against him.

'Yes, yes, I see; I know; but all that will come out on the trial,' the judge said, trying to silence him.

But Peterkin held on, until his eye caught Harold, when he let the judge go, and seating himself beside the young man began in a soft, coaxing tone for him:

'I don't see why in thunder you are goin' agin me, who have allus been your friend, and gin you work when you couldn't git it any where else; and I can't imagine what you're goin' to say, or what you know.'

Harold's face was very red, but his manner was respectful as he replied:

'You cannot be more sorry than I am that I am subpoenaed as a witness against you. I did not seek it. I could not help it: but, being a witness, I must answer the questions truthfully.'

'Thunder and lightning, man! Of course you must! Don't I know that?' the irascible Peterkin growled, getting angry at once. 'Of course you must answer questions, but you needn't blab out stuff they don't ask you, so as to lead 'em on. I know 'em, the blood-hounds; they'll squeeze you dry, once let 'em git an inklin' you know sunthin' more. Now, if this goes agin me, I'm out at least thirty thousand dollars; and between you and I, I don't mind givin' a cool two thousand, or three, or mebby five, right out of pocket, cash down, to anybody whose testimony, without bein' a lie—I don't want nobody to swear false, remember—but, heaven and earth, can't a body furgit a little, and keep back a lot if they want to?' 'What are you trying to say to me?' Harold asked, his face pale with resentment, as he suspected the man's motive.

'Say to you? Nothin', only that I'll give five thousand dollars down to the chap whose testimony gits me off and flings old Wilson.'

'Mr. Peterkin,' Harold said, looking the old wretch full in the face, 'if you are trying to bribe me, let me tell you at once that I am not to be bought. I shall not volunteer information, but shall answer truthfully whatever is asked me.'

'Go to thunder, then! I always knew you were a bad aig,' Peterkin roared; and as there was nothing to be made from Harold, he changed his seat to try his tactics elsewhere.

Left to himself, Harold had time to think of the diamonds, which, indeed, had not been absent from his thoughts a moment, since Jerrie gave them to him. They were closely buttoned in his coat pocket, where they burned like fire, as he wondered where and how Jerrie had found them.

'In the Tramp House it must have been,' he said to himself; 'but who put them there, and how did she chance to find them, and why did she look so wild and excited, so like a crazy person, when she gave them to me, bidding me let no one see them?'

These questions he could not answer, and his brain was all in a whirl when the train reached Springfield, and, with the others, he registered himself at the hotel. Suddenly, like a gleam of lightning seen through a rift of clouds, there came back to him, with a horrible distinctness, the words the child Jerry had spoken to him that day years ago, when he had walked homeward with her through the leafy woods from the Park House, where he had been questioned so closely by Mrs. Tracy with regard to her diamonds and what he had been doing in the house on the morning of their disappearance.

'I know where those diamonds are, but I shan't tell while there is such a fuss,' she had said, and in his abstraction he had scarcely noticed it then, but it came back to him now with fearful significance, making him sick, and faint, and cold, although the great drops of sweat stood thickly upon his lips and under his hair, as, after the gas was lighted, he sat alone in a little reception-room opening from one of the parlors. Did Jerrie know where they were, and had she known all the time and not spoken? And, if so, was she not guilty as an accessory, at least in trying to shield another? For that she took them herself he never for a moment dreamed. It was some one else, and she knew and did not tell. He was certain of it now, as every incident connected with her strange sickness came back to him, when she seemed to be doing penance for another's fault. She had called herself an accessory, and that was what she was, or rather what the world would call her, if it knew. To him she was Jerrie, the girl he loved, and he would defend her to the bitter end, no matter how culpable she had been in keeping silence so long.

But who took them! That was the question puzzling him so much as he sat thinking with his head bent down, and so absorbed that he did not hear a step in the adjoining room, or know that Peterkin had seated himself just where a large mirror showed him distinctly the young man in the next room, whom he recognized at once, though Harold never moved for a few moments or lifted his head.

At last, however, he unbuttoned his coat and after glancing cautiously around to make sure no one was near, he took the box from his pocket, and holding the stones to the light examined them carefully, taking in his hand first the ear-rings and then the pin, and holding them in such a way that two or three times they flashed directly in the eyes of the cruel man watching him.

'Yes, they are Mrs. Tracy's diamonds; there can be no mistake,' he whispered, just as he became conscious that there was some one in the door looking at him.

Quick as thought he put the box out of sight just as Peterkin's voice, exultant and hateful, cried out:

'Hallo, Mr. Prayer-book! your piety won't let you keep back a darned thing you know agin me, but it lets you have in your possession diamonds which I'd eenamost sware was them stones Miss Tracy lost years ago and suspected you of takin. I know the box anyway, I heard it described so often, and I b'lieve I know them diamonds. I seen 'em in the lookin'-glass, settin' in t'other room, and seen you look all round like a thief afore you opened 'em. So, fork over, and mebby you can give me back May Jane's pin you stole at the party the night Mr. Arthur came home. Fork over, I say!'

Too much astonished at first to speak, Harold stood staring at the man who had attacked him so brutally, while his hand closed tightly over the diamonds in his pocket, as if fearing they might be wrenched from him by force.

'Will you fork over, or shall I call the perlice?' Peterkin asked.

'Call the police as soon as you like,' Harold replied, 'but I shall not give you the diamonds.'

'Then you own that you've got 'em! That's half the battle!' Peterkin said, coming up close to him, and looking at him with a meaning smile more detestable than any menace could have been. 'I know you've got 'em, and I can run you if I try, and then what will your doxie think of you! Will she refuse my Bill for a thief, and treat me as if I was dirt?'

'What do you mean, sir?' Harold demanded, feeling intuitively that by his doxie Jerrie was meant, and feeling a great horror, too, lest by some means Jerrie's name should be mixed up with the affair before she had a chance to explain.

The reference to Billy was a puzzle, but Peterkin did not leave him in doubt.

'I mean that you think yourself very fine, and always have, and that are girl of the carpet-bag thinks herself fine, too, and refused my Bill for you, who hain't a cent in the world. I seen it in her face when I twitted her on it, and she riz up agin me like a catamount. But I'll be even with you both yit. I've got you in my power, young man, but—' and here he came a step or two nearer to Harold, and dropping his voice to a whisper said: 'I sha'n't do nothin', nor say nothin' till you've gin your evidence, and if you hold your tongue I will. You tickle me, and I'll tickle you! see!'

Harold was too indignant to reply, and feeling that he was degrading himself every moment he spent in the presence of that man, he left the room without a word, and went to his own apartment, but not to sleep, for never had he spent so wretched a night as that which followed his interview with Peterkin. Of what the man could do to him, he had no fear. His anxiety was all for Jerrie. Where did she find the diamonds, and for whom did she keep silence so long? and what would be said of the act when it was known, as it might be, though not from him?

Two or three times he arose and lighted the gas, examined the diamonds carefully to see if there were not some mistake. But there could be none. He had seen them on the lady's person and had heard them described so accurately that he could not be mistaken; and then the box was the same he had once seen when Jack took him to his mother's room to show him what Uncle Arthur had brought. That was a tortoise shell, of an oval shape, lined with blue satin, and this was a tortoise shell, oval shaped, and lined with blue satin. Harold felt, when at last the daylight shone into his room, that if it had tarried a moment longer he must have gone mad. He was very white and haggard, and there were dark rings under his eyes, when he went down to the office, where the first person he met was Billy, who also looked pale and worn, with a different expression upon his face from anything Harold had ever seen before. It was as if all life and hope had gone, leaving him nothing now to care for. In his anxiety and worry about the diamonds Harold had scarcely given a thought to what Peterkin had said of Jerrie's refusal of Billy, for it seemed so improbable that the latter would presume to offer himself to her; but at sight of Billy's face it came back to him with a throb of pity for the man, and a thrill of joy for himself for whom Peterkin had said his son was rejected.

'Does Billy know of the diamonds, I wonder?' he thought.

As if to answer the question in the negative, Billy came quickly forward, and offering his hand, bade Harold good-morning, and then motioning him to a seat, took one beside him, and began:

'I'm awful sorry, Hal, th-that you are mix-mixed up in th-this but I sup suppose you m-must t-tell the truth.'

'Yes, I must tell the truth, Harold said.'

'Fa-father will be so m-mad,' Billy continued. 'I wi-wish I could t-t-testify f-for you, bu-but I can't. You were th-there, I wa-wan't, and all I know fa-father told me; bu-but d don't volunteer information.'

'No,' Harold said, slowly, wishing that the ocean were rolling between him and this detestable suit.

Once he resolved to go to Judge St. Claire, deliver up the diamonds, and tell him all he knew about them, but this would be bringing Jerrie into the matter, and so he changed his mind and wondered aimlessly about the town until it was time for him to appear at the court-house, where a crowd was gathering. It was late before the suit known as Wilson vs. Peterkin was called, and later still when Harold took the stand.

White and trembling, so that both his hands and his knees were shaking visibly, he seemed more like a criminal than a witness, he was so agitated and pre-occupied, too, it would seem, for at first his answers were given at random, as if he hardly knew what he was saying; nor did he, for over and beyond the sea of long faces confronting him, Judge St. Claire's wondering and curious—Billy's wondering, too—Wilson's disappointed and surprised, and Peterkin's threatening and exultant by turns—he saw only Jerrie coming to him in the lane and asking him to keep the diamonds for her—saw her, too, away back years ago up in the little low room, with her fever-stained cheeks and shorn head, talking the strangest things of prisons, and substitutes, and accessories, and assuring some one that she would never tell, and was going for him, if necessary.

Who was that man? Where was he now? and why had he imposed this terrible secret upon Jerrie?

These were the thoughts crowding through his brain while he was being questioned as to what he knew of the agreement between the plaintiff and defendant while in the office of the latter. Once a thought of Maude crossed his mind with a keen pang of regret, as he remembered the lovely face which had smiled so fondly upon him, mistaking his meaning utterly, and appropriating to herself the love he was trying to tell her was another's. And with thoughts of Maude there came a thought of Arthur, the very first which Harold had given him, Arthur, the crazy man, who himself had hidden the diamonds and for whom Jerrie was ready to sacrifice so much. It was clear as daylight to him now, the anxiety and stain were over, and those who were watching him so intently as he gave his answers at random, with the sweat pouring like rain down his face, were electrified at the start he gave as he came to himself and realized for the first time where he was, and why he was there. Arthur would never see Jerrie wronged. She was safe, and with this load lifted from him, he gave his whole attention to the business on hand, answering the questions now clearly and distinctly.

When at last the lawyer said to him, 'Repeat what you can remember of the conversation which took place between the plaintiff and the defendant on the morning of ——, 18—,' he gave one sorry look at poor Billy, who was the picture of shame and confusion, and then, in a clear, distinct voice, which filled every corner of the room, told what he had heard said in his presence, and what he knew of the transaction, proving conclusively that the plaintiff was right and Peterkin a rascal, and this in the face of the man who had asked him not to blab and who shook his fist at him threateningly as the narrative went on.

'Would you believe the defendant under oath?' was asked at the close, and Harold answered, promptly:

'Under oath—yes.'

'Would you, if not under oath?'

'If an untruth would be to his advantage, no,' and then Harold was through.

As he stepped down from the witness stand old Peterkin arose, so angry that at first he could scarcely articulate his words.

'You dog! you liar! you thief! he screamed; 'to stand there and lie so about me! I'll teach you—I'll show 'em what you are. If there's a perlice here, I call on 'em to arrest this feller for them diamonds of Miss Tracy's! They are in his pocket—or was last night. I seen 'em myself, and he dassent deny it.'

By this time the court-house was in wild confusion, as the spectators arose from their seats and pressed forward to where Peterkin stood denouncing Harold, who was white as ashes, and looked as if he were going to faint, as Billy hastened to his side, whispering:

'Lean on me, and I will get you out of this. Father is mad.'

But order was soon restored, though not until Peterkin had yelled again, as Harold was leaving the room:

'Search him, I tell you! Don't let him escape! He's got 'em in his pocket—Miss Tracy's diamonds! Lord of heavens! don't you remember the row there was about 'em years ago?'

Of what followed during the next hour Harold knew very little. There was a crowd around him, and cries of 'He is going to faint!' while Billy's stammering voice called pleadingly, 'St-stand back, ca-can't you, and gi-give him air.'

Then, a deluge of water in his face; then a great darkness and the voices sounded a long way off, and he felt so tired and sleepy, and thought of Jerry, and Maude, and lived over again the scene in the Tramp-House, when he found the former in the bag, and felt her little fat arms around his neck as he staggered with her through the snow, wondering why she was so heavy, and why her feet were dragging on the ground. When he came more fully to himself, he was in a little room in the court-house, and Billy's arm was lying protectingly across his shoulder, while Billy's father was bellowing like a bull:

'Be you goin' to let him go! Ain't you goin' to git a writ and arrest him! Why don't you handcuff him, somebody? And you, Bill, be you a fool to stan' there a huggin' him as if he was a gal! What do you mean?'

'Ha-Hal is my fr-friend, father. He never to-took the diamonds,' Billy answered, sadly, while Judge St. Claire, who had the box of jewels in his hand and was looking very anxious, turned to the angry man clamoring so loudly for a writ and said, sternly:

'Even if Harold took the diamonds—which he did not, I am certain of that—there is some mistake which he will explain; but if he took them, it is too late to arrest him. A theft commited ten years ago cannot be punished now.'

'May the Lord give you sense,' Peterkin rejoined, with a derisive laugh. 'Don't tell me that a body can't be punished for stealin' diamonds ef 'twas done a hundred years ago,'

'But it is true, nevertheless,' the judge replied.

Turning to another lawyer who was standing near, Peterkin asked:

'Is that so, square? Is it so writ? Is that the law?'

'That is the law,' was the response.

'Wall, I'll be condumbed, if that don't beat all!' Peterkin exclaimed. 'Can't be sent to prison! I swow! There ain't no law or justice for nobody but me, and I must be kicked to the wall! I'll give up, and won't try to be nobody, I vurm!' And as he talked he walked away to ruminate upon the injustice of the law which could not touch Harold Hastings, but could throw its broad arms tightly around himself.

Meanwhile the Judge had ordered a carriage and taken Harold with him to his private room in the hotel, where the hardest part for Hal was yet to come.

'Now, my boy,' the judge said, after he had made Harold lie down upon the couch and had locked the door, 'now, tell me all about it. How came you by the diamond?'

It was such a pitiful, pleading, agonized face which lifted itself from the cushion and looked at Judge St. Claire, as Harold began:

'I cannot tell you now—I must not? but by and by perhaps I can. They were handed to me to keep by some one, just for a little while. I cannot tell you who it was. I think I would die sooner than do it. Certainly I would rather go to prison, as Peterkin wishes me to.'

There was a thoughtful, perplexed look on the judge's face as he said:

'This is very strange, Harold, that you cannot tell who gave them to you, and with some people will be construed against you.'

'Yes, I know it; but I would rather bear it than have that person's name brought in question,' was Harold's reply.

'Do you think that person took them?' the judge asked.

'No, a thousand times, no!' and Harold leaped to his feet and began to pace the floor hurriedly. 'They never took them, never; I'd swear to that with my life. Don't talk any more about it, please; I can't bear it. I have gone through so much to-day, and last night I never slept a wink. Oh, I am so tired!' and with a groan he threw himself again upon the couch, and, closing his eyes, dropped almost instantly into a heavy slumber, from which the judge did not rouse him until after dinner, when he ordered some refreshments sent to his room, and himself awoke the young man, whose face looked pinched, and white, and haggard, and who could only swallow a cup of coffee and a part of a biscuit.

'I am so tired,' he kept repeating; 'but I shall be better in the morning;' and long before the night train had come he was in bed sleeping off the effects of the day's excitement.

The next morning when he went down to the office he was surprised and bewildered at the crowd which gathered around him—the friends who had came on the train to stand by and defend him, if necessary; and as the home faces he had known all his life looked kindly into his, and the familiar voices of his boyhood told him of sympathy for and faith in him, while hand after hand took his in a friendly clasp, that of Dick St. Claire clinging to his with a grasp which said plainer than words could have done: 'I believe in you, Hal, and am so sorry for you,' the tension of his nerves gave way entirely, and, sinking down in their midst, he cried like a child when freed from some terrible danger.

He had not thought before that he cared for himself what people said, but he knew now that he did, and this assurance of confidence from his friends unnerved him for a time; then, dashing away his tears and lifting up his face, on which his old winning smile was breaking, he said:

'Excuse me for this weakness; only girls should cry, but I have borne so much, and your coming was such a surprise. Thank you all. I cannot say what I feel. I should cry again if I did.'

'Never mind, old boy,' Dick's cheery voice called out. 'We know what you would say. We came to help you, just a few of us; but if anything had really happened to you, why, all Shannondale would have turned out to the rescue.'

'Thank you, Dick,' Harold said, the tears starting again; then, as his eye fell for the first time upon Tom, he exclaimed, with a glad ring in his voice, 'and you, too, Tom!'

'Yes, I thought I'd come with the crowd and see the fun,' Tom answered, indifferently, as he walked away by himself.

Tom had said very little, on the train, or after they had reached the hotel, but no one had listened with more eagerness to every detail of the matter than he had done, and all that morning he was busy gathering up every item of information, and listening to the guesses as to who the person could be who gave the diamonds to Harold.

The jewels had been identified by his father and by himself, although an identification was scarcely necessary as Harold had distinctly said:

'They are the Tracy diamonds, and the person who gave them, to me said so.'

But who was the person? That was the question puzzling the heads of all the Shannondale people as the morning wore on, and each went where he liked. At last, toward noon, Tom found himself near Harold in front of the court-house, and going up to him, said:

'Hal, I wan't to talk to you a little while.'

'Yes,' Hal said, assentingly, and selecting out a retired corner, Tom began:

'Hal, I've never shown any great liking for you, and I don't s'pose I have any, but I don't like to see a man kicked for nothing, and so I came over with the rest.'

'Thank you, Tom,' Harold replied, 'I don't think you ever did like me, and I don't think I cared if you didn't, but I'm glad you came. Is that all you wished to say to me?'

'So,' Tom answered. 'Jerrie is very sick—'

'Jerrie! Jerrie sick! Oh, Tom!'

It was a cry of almost despair as Harold thought, 'What if she should die and the people never know.'

'She had an awful headache when you left her in the lane, and I walked home with her, and the next morning she was raving mad—kind of a brain fever, I guess.'

Harold was stupefied, but he managed to ask:

'Does she talk much? What does she say?'

There was alarm in his voice, which the sagacious Tom detected at once, and, strengthened in his suspicion, he replied:

'Nothing about the diamonds, and the Lord knows I hope she won't.'

'What do you mean!' Harold asked, in a frightened tone.

'Don't you worry,' Tom replied. 'I wouldn't harm Jerrie any more than you would, but—Well, Hal, you are a trump! Yes, you are, to hold your tongue and let some think you are the culprit. Hal, Jerrie gave you the diamonds. I saw her do it in the lane as I came up to you. I did not think of it at the time, but afterward it came to me that you took something from her and slipped it into your pocket, and that you both looked scared when you saw me. Jerrie was abstracted and queer all the way to the house, and had a bruise on her head, and she keeps talking of the Tramp House and Peterkin, who, she says, dealt the blow. I went to the Tramp House, and found the old table on the floor, with three of the legs on it; the fourth I couldn't find. I thought at first that the old wretch had quarreled with her about you on account of the suit, and she had squared up to him, and he had struck her; but now I believe he had the diamonds, and she got them from him in some way, and he struck her with the missing table-leg. If you say so, I'll have him arrested.'

Tom had told his story rapidly, while Harold listened breathlessly, until he suggested the arrest of Peterkin, when he exclaimed:

'No, no, Tom. No; don't you see that would mix Jerrie's name up with the diamonds, and that must not be. She must not be mentioned in connection with them until she speaks for herself; and, besides, I do not believe it was Peterkin who took them. It might have been your Uncle Arthur.'

'Uncle Arthur?' Tom said, indignantly. 'Why, he gave them to mother.'

'I know he did,' Harold continued; 'but in a crazy fit he might have taken them away and secreted them and then forgotten it, and Jerrie might have known it, and not been able to find them till now. Many things go to prove that;' and very briefly Harold repeated some incidents connected with Jerrie's illness when she was a child.

'That looks like it, certainly,' Tom said; 'but I am awfully loth to give up arresting the brute, and believe I shall do it yet for assault and battery. He certainly struck her. You will see for yourself the lump on her head.'

So saying Tom arose to go away, but before he went made a remark quite characteristic of him and his feeling for Harold, to whom he said, with a laugh:

'Don't for thunder's sake, think us a kind of a Damon and Pythias twins, because I've joined hands with you against Peterkin and for Jerrie. Herod and Pilate, you know, became friends, but I guess at heart they were Pilate and Herod still.'

'No danger of my presuming at all upon your friendship for myself, though I thank you for your interest in Jerrie,' Harold replied.

Then the two separated, Tom going his way and Harold his, until it was time for the afternoon train which was to take them home.

The suit had gone against Peterkin, and it was in a towering rage that he stood in the long depot, denouncing everybody, and swearing he would sell out Lubbertoo and every dumbed thing he owned in Shannondale and take his money away, 'and then see how they'd git along without his capital to boost 'em.' At Harold he would not even look, for his testimony had been the most damaging of all, and he frowned savagely when on entering the car he saw his son in the same seat with him, talking in low, earnest tones, while Harold was evidently listening to him with interest. Small as he was and mean in personal appearance, there was more of true manhood in Billy's finger than in his father's whole body. The suit had been a pain and trouble to Billy, from beginning to end, for he knew his father was in the wrong, and he bore no malice toward Harold for his part in it, and when the diamonds came up, and his father was clamoring for a writ, he was the first to declare Harold's innocence and to say he would go his bail. Now, there was in his mind another plan by which to benefit his friend, and rival, too—for Billy knew he was that; and the heart of the little man ached with a bitter pain and sense of loss whenever he thought of Jerrie, and lived over again the scene under the butternut tree by the river, when her blue eyes had smiled so kindly upon him and her hands had touched his, even while she was breaking his heart. When Billy reached his majority his father had given him $100,000, and thus he had business of his own to transact, and a part of this was just now centered in Washington Territory, where, in Tacoma, on Puget Sound, he owned real estate and had dealings with several parties. To attend to this an agent was needed for a while, and he said to himself;

'I'll offer it to Hal, with such a salary that he cannot refuse it; that will get him out of the way until this thing blows over.'

Billy knew perfectly well that although everybody said Harold was innocent and that nine-tenths believed it, there would still be a few in Shannondale—the scum whose opinions his father's money controlled—who, without exactly saying they doubted him, would make it unpleasant for him in many ways; and from this he would save him by sending him to Tacoma at once, and thus getting him out of the way of any unpleasantness which might arise from his father's persecutions or those of his clan. It was this which he was proposing to Harold, who at once thought favorably of it—not because he wished to escape from the public, he said, but because of the pay offered, and which seemed to him far more than his services would be worth.

'You are a noble fellow, Billy,' he said. 'I'll think of the plan, and let you know after I've seen Jerrie and Judge St. Claire.'

'A-all ri-right; he'll a-advise you to go,' Billy said, as they arose to leave the car, followed by Peterkin, who had been engaged in a fierce altercation with Tom, who had accused him of having struck Jerrie, and threatened to have him arrested for assault and battery the moment they reached Shannondale.

'Thunder and lightning and guns' old Peterkin exclaimed, while the spittle flew from his mouth like the spray from Niagara. 'I assault and batter Jerry Crawford!—a gal! What do you take me for, young man? I'm a gentleman, I be, if I ain't a Tracy; and I never salted nor battered nobody, and she'll tell you so herself. Heavens and earth! this is the way 'twas,' and Peterkin shook from his head to his feet—for, like most men who clamor so loudly for the law, he had a mortal terror of it for himself, and Tom's threatening looks and words made him afraid. 'This is how 'twas. I found her in the Tramp-House, and I was all-fired mad at her about somethin'—I shan't tell what, for Bill would kill me; but I pitched into her right and left; and, by gum, she pitched into me, so that for a spell it was nip-and-tuck betwixt us; and, by George, if she didn't order me out of the Tramp-House, and said it was her'n; and I'll be dumbed if I don't believe she'd av put me out, too, body and bones, if I hadn't gone. She was just like a tiger; and, I swan, I was kinder feared on her, and backed out with a kinder flourish of my fist on that darned old rotten table, which went all to smash; and that's all I know. You don't call that 'sault and batter, do you?'

Tom could not say that he did, but he replied:

'That's your version of it. Jerrie may have another, and her friends ain't going to have her abused by a chap like you; and my advice is that you hold your tongue, both about her and Harold. It will he better for you. Do you understand?'

'You bet!' Peterkin said, with a meaning nod, breathing a little more freely as he caught sight of the highest tower of Lubbertoo, and more freely still when he arrived at the station, where he was met by his coat-of-arms carriage, instead of a writ, and was suffered to go peaceably home, a disappointed, if not a better man.



CHAPTER XLIII.

HAROLD AND JERRIE.

The news which so electrified all Shannondale was slow in reaching Mrs. Crawford, but it did reach her at last, crushing and overwhelming her with a sense of shame and anguish, until as the day wore on, Grace Atherton, and Mrs. St. Claire, and Nina, and many others came to reassure her, and to say that it was all a mistake, which would be soon cleared up.

Thus comforted and consoled, she tried to be calm, and wait patiently for the train. But there was a great pity for her boy in her heart as she sat by Jerrie's bedside and watched her in all her varying moods, now perfectly quiet, with her wide open eyes staring up at the ceiling as if she were seeing something there, now talking of Peterkin, and the Tramp House, and the table, and the blow, and again of the bag, which she said was lost, and which her grandmother must find.

Thinking she meant the carpet bag, Mrs. Crawford brought that to her, but she tossed it aside impatiently saying:

'No, no; the other one, which tells it all. Where is it! I must have lost it. Find it, find it. To be so near, and yet so far. What did it say? Why can't I think? Am I like Mr. Arthur—crazy, like him?'

Mrs. Crawford thought her crazier than Arthur, and waited still more impatiently for Harold, until she heard his step outside, and knew that he had come.

'Harold!'

'Grandma!' was all they said for a moment while the poor old lady was sobbing on his neck, and then he comforted her as best he could, telling her that it was all over now—that no one but Peterkin had accused him—that everybody was ready to defend him, and that after a little he could explain everything.

'And now I must see Jerrie,' he continued, starting for the stairs, and glad that his grandmother did not attempt to follow him.

Jerrie had heard his voice, and had raised herself in bed, and as he came in, met him with the question:

'Have you brought them? Has any one seen them?'

The strange light in her eyes should have told Harold how utterly incapable she was of giving any rational answers to his questions, but he did not think of that, and instead of trying to quiet her, he plunged at once into the subject she had broached:

'Do you mean the diamonds?' he asked.

'Yes,' she replied, 'the diamonds! the diamonds! Where are they?'

'Mrs. Tracy has them by this time,' Harold replied.

'Mrs. Tracy!' Jerrie exclaimed. 'What has she to do with them? They are not hers. They are mine—they are mine! Bring them to me—bring them to me.'

She was terribly excited, and for a time Harold bent all his energies to soothe her, and at last when from sheer exhaustion she became quiet he said to her:

'Jerrie, where did you find the diamonds?'

She looked at him curiously, but made no reply, and he continued:

'You must tell me where you found them: it is necessary I should know.'

Still she did not reply, but stared at him, as if not fully comprehending what he meant.

'Jerrie,' he said again, 'do you love me?'

Quickly her eyes filled with tears, and she replied:

'Love you, Harold! Yes, more than you ever dreamed of; more than you love me.'

Instantly Harold had his arms around her, for she had risen to a sitting posture, and pillowing her head upon his breast, he said:

'No, darling, that is impossible, for I love you better than my life,' and his lips pressed hers passionately. He felt that this was their betrothal, for he did not take into consideration the state of her mind; but she undeceived him quickly, for although she kissed him back, she said, with a tinge of sarcasm in her voice:

'Aren't you afraid they will see you?'

'Who are they?' he asked, and she replied

'The people, and the Harvard boys and Maude.'

He did not know at all what she meant, but at the mention of Maude he groaned involuntarily, as the white face came up before him again and the eyes looked into his, fuller far of love and tenderness than those confronting him so steadily, with no consciousness of his real meaning in them.

'Those diamonds have caused me a great deal of trouble,' he began again, 'and will cause me more unless you tell me where you found them. Try and think. Was it in the Tramp House?'

That started her at once, and she began to rave of the Tramp House, and the rat-hole, and the table, and Peterkin, who dealt the blow. The bruise on her head had not proved so serious as was at first feared, and with her tangled hair falling over her face Harold had not noticed it. But he looked at it now and questioned her of it, and asking if Peterkin had struck her there.

'No,' she said, and began the senseless babbling of rat-holes, and table-legs and bags, and diamonds until Harold became alarmed and went for his grandmother.

There was nothing to be learned from Jerrie in her present condition, and so Harold started for the Tramp House to see what that would tell him. The table was still upon the floor, with the three legs piled upon it, while the fourth one was missing. But Harold found it at last; for, remembering what Jerrie had said of the rat-hole, he investigated that spot, and from its enlarged appearance drew his own conclusion. Jerrie had found the diamonds there; he had no doubt of it, and he told Tom Tracy so; for, as if there was a fascination about the place for him, Tom appeared in the door-way just as Harold was leaving it. Sitting down upon the bench where Jerrie had sat that day when Peterkin attacked her, the two young men who had been enemies all their lives, but who were now drawn together by a common sympathy and love for the same girl, talked the matter over again, each arriving at the same theory as the most probable one they could accept.

'Arthur, in a crazy fit, had secreted the diamonds, and Jerrie knew it, but possibly not where he had put them. This accounted for her strange sickness when a child, while her finding them later on, added to other causes, would account for her sickness now. Peterkin owns that he was blowing her up for something, and that he knocked the table down with his fist, but he swears he didn't touch her,' Tom said, repeating in substance all Peterkin had said to him in the train when shaking with fear of a writ.

'And do you still mean to keep silent with regard to Jerrie?' Tom asked.

'Yes,' Harold replied; 'her name must not be mentioned in connection with the diamonds. I can't have the slightest breath of suspicion touching Jerrie, my sister.'

'Sister be hanged!' Tom began savagely, then checked himself, and added with a sneering laugh: 'Don't try to deceive me, Hal, with your sister business. You love Jerrie, and she loves you, and that is one reason why I hate you, or shall, when this miserable business is cleared up. Just now we must pull together and find out where she found the diamonds, and who put them there. To write to Uncle Arthur would do no good, though seeing him might; the last we heard he was thinking of taking the coast voyage from San Francisco to Tacoma.'

'Tom,' Harold exclaimed, with great energy, as he sprang to his feet, 'that decides me;' and then he told of the offer Billy had made him on the car. 'When I saw how sick Jerrie was, I made up my mind not to accept it, although I need the money badly. But now, if Jerrie gets no worse, I shall start for Tacoma in a few days and shall find your uncle Arthur, if he is to be found.'

It was growing dark when the two young men finally emerged from the house and stood for a moment outside, while Harold inquired for Maude.

'She is not very well, that's a fact,' Tom said, gloomily; 'and no wonder, when mother keeps her cooped up in one room, without enough fresh air, and lets nobody see her except the family and the doctor, for fear they will excite her. She knows nothing about the diamonds, nor that Jerrie is sick. I did tell her, though, that you had come home; and, by Jove! I pretty near forgot it. She wants to see you bad; but, Lord! mother won't let you in. No use to try. She's like a she-wolf guarding its cub. Good-night.'

And Tom walked away, while Harold went back to the cottage, where he found Jerrie sleeping very quietly, with a look on her face so like that it had worn in her babyhood, when he called her his little girl, that he involuntarily stooped down and kissed it as one would kiss a beautiful baby.

The next morning Jerrie was very restless, and talked wildly of the Tramp House and the diamonds, insisting that they were hers and must be brought to her.

'Why did you tell her about them?' Mrs. Crawford asked, reproachfully.

But Harold did not reply, his mind was so torn with distracting doubts as to whether he ought to take the western trip or not.

If he went, he must go at once, and to leave Jerrie in her present state seemed impossible. He would consult the physician first, and Judge St. Claire next. The doctor gave it as his opinion that Jerrie was in no danger, if she were only kept quiet. She had taken a severe cold and overtaxed her strength, while most likely she had inherited from some one a tendency to be flighty when anything was the matter, and he thought Harold might venture to leave her.

'Yes, I'd go if I were you,' he added, looking intently at the young man; for, like Billy, he too thought it might be pleasanter for him to be out of the way for a time, although he did not say so.

And this was the view the judge took of it, after a few moments' conversation. His first question had been:

'Well, my boy, can you tell me now who gave them to you?'

'No, I can't,' was Harold's reply; and then, acting upon a sudden impulse, he burst out impetuously: 'Yes, I will tell you, for I can trust you, and I want your advice so badly.'

So he repeated rapidly all he knew, and his theory with regard to Arthur, whom he wished so much to find, and of Billy's proposition that he should go on his business to Tacoma. For a few moments the judge seemed perplexed and undecided, for he was balancing in his mind the pros and cons for going from the people, or staying to face them. If he stayed he might have some unpleasant things to bear and hear, for there were those who would talk, in spite of their protestations of the young man's innocence; while to go might look like running away from the storm, with the matter unexplained. On the whole, however, he decided that it was better to go.

'Jerrie's interests are safe with me,' he said, 'and by the time you return everything will be explained; but find Mr. Tracy as soon as possible. I am inclined to think your theory with regard to him correct.'

So it was decided that Harold should go, and the next night was appointed for him to start. Had he known that Peterkin, and even Mrs. Tracy, were each in his or her own way insinuating that he was running from public opinion, nothing could have induced him to leave. But he did not know it, and went about his preparations with as brave a heart as he could command under the circumstances. Jerrie was more quiet now, though every effort on his part to learn anything from her concerning the diamonds brought on a fit of raving, when she would insist that the jewels were hers, and must be brought to her at once.

'But you told me they were Mrs. Tracy's,' he said to her once.

With a cunning gleam in her eyes, she replied:

'So they are, or were; but oh, how little you know!'

And this was all he could get from her.

He told her he was going away, but that did not seem to affect her, and she only began to talk of Maude, who, she said, must not be harmed.

'Have you seen her? have you seen her?' she kept saying.

'Not yet,' he replied, 'but I am going to say good-bye;' and on the day of his departure he went to the Park House and asked if he could see Maude.

'Of course not,' was Mrs. Tracy's prompt reply, when the request was taken to her. 'No one sees her, and I certainly shall not allow him to enter her room.'

'But, Dolly,' Frank began, protestingly, but was cut short by the lady, who said:

'You needn't "Dolly" me, or try to take his part, either. I have my opinion, and always shall. He cannot see Maude, and you may tell him so,' turning now to the servant who had brought Harold's message, and who softened it as much as possible.

Harold had half expected a refusal, and was prepared for it. Taking a card from his pocket, he wrote upon it:

'DEAR MAUDE,—I am going away for a few weeks, and am very sorry that I cannot see you; but your mother knows best, of course, and I must not do anything to make you worse. I shall think of you very often, and hope to find you much better when I return.

'HAROLD.'

'Will you give this to her?' he said to the girl, who answered that she would, and who, of course, read every word before she took it to her young mistress, late in the afternoon, while the family were at dinner, and she was left in charge of the invalid.

'Mr. Hastings sent you this,' she said, handing the card to Maude, into whose face the bright color rushed, but left it instantly as she read the few hurried lines.

'Going away! Gone! and I didn't see him!' she exclaimed, regardless of consequences. 'And mother did it. I know she did. I will talk till I spit blood; then see what she'll say!' she continued, as the frightened girl tried to stop her, and as she could not, ran for Mrs. Tracy, who came in much alarm, asking what was the matter.

'You sent Harold away. You didn't let him see me, and he is—'

Maude gasped, but could get no farther, for the paroxysm of coughing which came on, together with a hemorrhage which made her so weak that they thought her dying all night, she lay so white, and still, and insensible, save at times when her lips moved, and her mother, bending over her, heard her whisper:

'Send for Harold.'

But it was too late now; the train had come and gone, and taken Harold with it, away from the girl he loved and from, the girls who loved him so devotedly, and both of whom, for a few days after his departure, went down very near to the gates of death, and whose first enquiry, when they at last came back to life and consciousness, was for Harold and why he stayed away.



CHAPTER XLIV.

JERRIE CLEARS HAROLD.

The next day two items of news went like wildfire through the little town of Shannondale—the first, set afloat by Peterkin and helped on by Mrs. Tracy, that Harold had run away from public opinion, which was fast turning against him since he could not explain where he found the diamonds; and the second, that both Maude Tracy and Jerrie Crawford were at the point of death, which made Harold's sudden departure all the more heinous in the eyes of his enemies; for what but conscious guilt could have prompted him to leave his sister, who, it was said, was calling for him with every breath, and charging him with having taken the diamonds? Now, this was false; for although Jerrie's fever had increased rapidly during the night, and her babbling was something terrible to hear, there was in it no accusation of Harold, although she was constantly talking to him, and asking for the diamonds and the bag.

'It is a pity he ever told her about them,' the doctor said, as twice each day, morning and night, for four successive days, he came and looked upon her fever-stained cheeks, and counted her rapid pulse, and took her temperature, and listened to her strange talk; and then, with a shake of his head, drove over to Tracy Park and stood by poor little Maude's couch, and looked into her death-white face, and counted her faint heartbeats, and tried in vain to find some word of encouragement for the stricken man, who looked about as much like death as the young girl so dear to him. And every morning, on his way from the cottage to Tracy Park, the doctor saw under the pines two young men, Tom and Dick, seated upon the iron bench each whittling a bit of pine, which one was unconsciously fashioning into a cross and the other into a grave-stone.

Tom had found Dick there working at his cross, and, after a simple good-morning, had sat down beside him and whittled in silence upon another bit of wood until the doctor appeared on his way to Tracy Park. Then the whittling ceased, and both young men arose, and, going forward, asked how Jerrie was.

'Pretty bad. Hal oughtn't to have gone, though I told him there was no danger. We must telegraph if she gets worse,' was the reply, as the doctor rode on.

Tom and Dick separated, and saw no more of each other until the next morning, when they went again, and whittled in silence under the pines until the doctor came in sight, when the same questions were asked and answered as on the previous day.

Billy never joined them, but sat under the butternut tree where Jerrie had refused him, for hours and hours watching the sluggish river, and wondering what the world would be to him if Jerrie were not in it. Had Billy been with Tom and Dick, he could not have whittled as they did, for all the nerve power had left his hands, which lay helplessly in his lap, and when he walked he looked more like a withered old man than a young one of twenty-seven.

Maude was the first to rally—her first question for Harold, her second for Jerrie—and her father, who was with her, answered truthfully that Harold had not returned, and that Jerrie was sick and could not come to her. He did not say how sick, and Maude felt no alarm, but waited patiently until Jerrie should appear. For Maude, on her brass bedstead with its silken hangings, and every possible luxury around her, there were hired nurses and a mother's care, with many kind inquiries, while it would seem as if every hand in town was stretched out to Jerrie, who was a general favorite. Flowers and fruit and delicacies of every kind were sent to the cottage, carriage after carriage stopped before the door, offer after offer of assistance was made to Mrs. Crawford, while Nina and Marian Raymond were there constantly; and Billy went to Springfield for a chair in which to wheel his sister to the cottage, for she could not yet mount into the dog-cart; and Tom and Dick whittled on until the cross and the grave-stone were finished, and, with a sickly smile, Tom said to Dick:

'Would you cut Jerrie's name upon it?'

'No; oh, no!' Dick answered, with a gasp. 'She may be better to-morrow.'

When, after a few days, the crisis was past, and Jerrie's strong constitution triumphed over the disease which had grappled with it, the whole town wore a holiday air as the people said to each other gladly: 'Jerrie is better; Jerrie will live!'

Her recovery was rapid, and within a week after the fever left her and she awoke to perfect consciousness, she was able to sit up a part of every day, and had walked across the floor and read a letter from Harold to his grandmother, full of solicitude for herself and enthusiasm for his trip over the wild mountains and across the vast plains to the lovely little city of Tacoma, built upon a cliff and looking seaward over the sound.

'Dear Harold,' Jerrie whispered. 'I shall be so glad when he comes home. Nothing can be done till then, and I am so bewildered when I try to think.'

In her weak state, everything seemed unreal to Jerrie, except the fact that she had found her mother—and such a mother!—and many times each day she thanked her God who had brought her this unspeakable joy, and asked that she might do right when the time came to act. She knew the bag was safe, for she had climbed to the top shelf and found it just where she had put it. But where were the diamonds? Had Harold taken them with him? Had he told any one? Did his grandmother know anything about them? she wondered. She tried in many ways to draw Mrs. Crawford out, but was unsuccessful, for there were now too much pain and bitterness connected with the diamonds for Mrs. Crawford to speak to her of them. The poisonous breath of gossip had been at work ever since Harold went away, quietly aided and abetted by Mrs. Tracy, who never failed to roll her eyes and shrug her shoulders when Harold's name was mentioned, and openly pushed on by Peterkin, until Tom Tracy went to him one day and threatened to have him tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail, if he ever breathed Harold's name again in connection with the diamonds.

'Wall, I swow!' was all Peterkin said, as he put an enormous quid of tobacco in his mouth, and walked away, thinking to himself, 'Twould take an all-fired while to scrape them tar and feathers off of me, I'm so big, and I b'lieve the feller meant it. Them high bucks wouldn't like no better fun than to make a spectacle of me; so I guess I'll dry up a spell.'

But the trouble did not stop with Peterkin's talk, for a neighboring Sunday paper, which fed its readers with all the choicest bits of gossip, came out with an article headed 'The Tracy Diamonds,' and after narrating the story in the most garbled and sensational manner, went on to comment upon the young man's having run away, rather than face public opinion, and to comment upon the law which could not touch him because the offence was committed so long ago.

One after another, and without either knowing that the other had done so, Tom, and Dick, and Billy, waited upon the editor of the Sunday News, threatening to sue him for libel if he did not retract every word of the offensive article in his next issue, which he did. But the mischief was done, and the paper found its way at last to Jerrie, sent unwittingly by Ann Eliza, who covered it over a basket of fruit and flowers which was carried one afternoon to the cottage.

Jerrie had been down stairs several times, but was in her room when the basket was brought to her. Raising the paper, she was about to throw it on the floor, when her eye caught the words, 'The Tracy Diamonds,' and with bloodless lips and wildly beating heart she read the article through, understanding the situation perfectly, and resolving at once how to act. It seemed to her that she was lifted above and out of herself, she felt so strong, and light, and well, as she threw on her bonnet and shawl, and taking the leather bag in her hand, hurried down stairs in quest of Mrs. Crawford.

'Grandma!' she exclaimed, 'why haven't you told me about Harold, and the suspicion resting on him, and why did you let him go until I was better, and what are the people saying? Tell me everything.'

Jerrie would not be put off, and Mrs. Crawford told her everything she knew, and that she herself had added to the mystery by the strange things she had said in her delirium about the diamonds, which she insisted were hers.

'And they are mine!' Jerrie said, while Mrs. Crawford looked at her in alarm, for her madness had returned.

'Where are you going?' she gasped, as Jerrie turned toward the door.

'To Tracy Park, to claim my own and clear Harold!' was the reply. 'When I come back I will tell you all, but now I cannot wait.'

'But, Jerrie, you are not strong enough to walk there, and besides they have company this afternoon, some kind of a new-fangled card party, and you must not go,' Mrs. Crawford said.