'Did she know where they came from? how did you manage it? Are you sure she did not suspect!' she asked.

'I put them on her dressing-bureau while she was at breakfast,' he replied, 'and when she came up there they were--large solitaire ear-rings and a bar with five stones, not quite as large or as fine as the ones she lost, but the best I could find at Tiffany's. Why, Jerry, what is the matter? You do not look glad a bit. I thought you wanted me to give them to her surrept.i.tiously, and I did,' he continued, as the expression of Jerry's face changed to one of blank dismay and disappointment, and the tears gathered in her eyes.

'I did--I do,' she said; 'but I meant, not new ones, but her very own--the ones you gave her.'

For a moment Arthur sat looking at her with a perplexed and troubled expression, as if wondering what she could mean, and why he had so utterly failed to please her; then he said, slowly:

'The ones I gave her? You make my head swim trying to remember, and the b.u.mble-bees are black-faced, instead of white, and stinging me dreadfully. I wish you would say nothing more of the diamonds. It worries me, and makes me feel as if I were in a nightmare, and I know nothing of them.'

Raising herself on her elbow and pointing her finger toward him in a half beseeching, half threatening way, Jerry said:

'As true as you live and breathe, and hope not to be hung and choked to death, don't you know where they are?'

This was the oath which Jerry's companions were in the habit of administering to each other in matters of doubt, and she now put it to Arthur as the strongest she knew.

'Of course not,' he answered, with a little irritation in his tone.

'What ails you, Cherry? Are you crazy, like myself? Struggle against it.

Don't let the bees get into your brain and swarm and buzz until you forget everything. You ought to remember; you do things you ought not to do. It is terrible to be crazy and half conscious of it all the time--conscious that no one believes what you say or holds you responsible for what you do.'

'Don't they?' Jerry asked, eagerly, for she knew the meaning of the word 'responsible.' 'If a crazy man or woman took the diamonds, and then forgot, and did not tell, and it was ever found out, wouldn't they be punished?'

'Certainly not,' was the rea.s.suring reply, 'Don't you know how many murders are committed and the murderer is not hung, because they say he is crazy?'

In a moment the cloud lifted from Jerry's face, which grew so bright that Arthur noticed the change, and said to her:

'You are better now, I see, and I must go before I undo it all.

Good-bye, and never say diamonds to me again; it gets me all in a--m a--well, a French pickle--mixed, you know.'

He kissed her tenderly, and promising to take her for a drive as soon as she was able, went out and left her alone, wondering why it was that his having given the diamonds to his sister-in-law had failed in its effect upon her, and upon himself, too.

For a long time after he was gone Jerry lay thinking with her eyes closed, so that if Harold or her grandmother came in they would think her asleep. Mr. Arthur was certainly crazy at times--very crazy. She could swear to that, and so could many others. And if a crazy man was not responsible for his acts, then he was not, and the law would not touch him; but with regard to the accessory, she was not sure. If that individual were not crazy, why, then he or she might be punished; and as the taste she had had of bread and water, and hard boards, in the shape of the floor, was not very satisfactory, and as Mrs. Tracy had other diamonds in the place of the lost ones, she finally determined to keep her own counsel and never tell what she had heard Arthur say that morning when the theft was discovered and he had talked so fast in German to her and to himself. If she had known where the diamonds were she might have managed to return them to their owner. But she did not know, and her better course was to keep quiet, hoping that in time Mr.

Arthur himself would remember and make rest.i.tution; for that he had forgotten and was sincere in saying that he knew nothing of them she was certain, and her faith in him, which for a little time had been shaken, was restored.

With this load lifted from her mind Jerry's recovery was rapid, and when the autumnal suns were just beginning to tinge the woodbine on the Tramp House and the maples in the park woods with scarlet, she took her accustomed seat in Arthur's room and commenced her lessons again with Maude, who had missed her sadly and who would have gone to see her every day during her sickness if her mother had permitted it.

CHAPTER XXIII.

ARTHUR'S LETTER.

Two weeks had pa.s.sed since Jerry's return to her lessons, and people had ceased to talk of the missing diamonds, although the offered reward of $500 was still in the weekly papers, and a detective still had the matter in charge, without, however, achieving the slightest success. No one had ever been suspected, and the thief, whoever he was, must have been an expert, and managed the affair with the most consummate skill.

Now that she had another set, Mrs. Tracy was content, and peace and quiet reigned in the household, except so far as Arthur was concerned.

He was restless and nervous, and given to fits of abstraction, which sometimes made him forget the two little girls, one of whom watched him narrowly; and once when they were alone and he seemed unusually absorbed in thought, she asked him if he were trying to think of something.

'Yes,' he said, looking up quickly and eagerly; 'that is it. I am trying to remember something which, it seems to me, I ought to remember; but I cannot, and the more I try, the farther it gets from me. Do you know what it is?'

Jerry hesitated a moment, and then she asked:

'Is it the diamonds?'

'Diamonds! No. What diamonds? Didn't I tell you never to say diamonds to me again? I am tired of it,' he said, and in his eyes there was a gleam which Jerry had never seen there before when they rested upon her. It made her afraid, and she answered, meekly:

'Then I cannot help you to remember.'

'Of course not. No one can,' Arthur replied, in a softened tone. 'It is something long ago, and has to do with Gretchen.'

Then suddenly brightening, as if that name had been the key to unlock his misty brain, he added;

'I have it; I know; it has come to me at last! Gretchen always sets me right. I wrote her a letter long ago--a year, it seems to me--and it has never been posted. Strange that I should forget that; but something came up--I can't tell what--and drove it from my mind.'

As he talked he was opening and looking in the drawer which Jerry had never seen but once before, and that when he took from it the letter in German, a paragraph of which he had bidden her read.

'Here it is!' he said, joyfully, as he took out a sealed envelope and held it up to Jerry. 'This is the letter which you must post to-day. I can trust it to you.'

He gave her the letter, which she took with a beating heart and a sense of shame and regret as she remembered her pledge to Mr. Frank Tracy. She had promised to take him any letter which Mr. Arthur might intrust to her care, and if she took this one from Arthur she must keep her word.

'Oh, I can't do it--I can't! It would be mean to Mr. Arthur,' she thought; and returning him the letter, she said: 'Please post it yourself; then you will be sure, and I might lose it, or forget. I am careless sometimes. Don't ask me to take it.'

She was pleading with her might; but Arthur paid no heed, and only laughed at her fears.

'I know you will not forget, and I'd rather trust you than Charles.

Surely, you will not refuse to do so small a favor for me?'

'No,' she said, at last, as she put the letter in her pocket, with the thought that, after all, there might be no harm in showing it to Mr.

Frank, who, of course, merely wished to see it, and would not think of keeping it.

But she did not know Frank Tracy or guess how great was his anxiety lest any message should ever reach a friend of Gretchen, if friend there were living. She found him in the room he called his office, where the dead woman had lain in her coffin, and where he often sat alone thinking of the day when the inquest was held, and when he took his first step in the downward road, which had led him so far that now it seemed impossible to turn back, even had he wished to do so, as he sometimes did.

'If I had never secreted the photograph, or the book with the handwriting, if I had shown them to Arthur, everything would have been so different, and I should have been free,' he was thinking, when Jerry knocked timidly at the door, rousing him from his reverie, and making him start with a nameless tsar which was always haunting him.

'Oh, Jerry, it is you,' he said, as the little girl crossed the threshold, and shutting the door, stood with her back against it, and her hands behind her. 'What is it?' he asked, as he saw her hesitating.

With a quick, jerky movement of the head, which set in motion the little rings of hair, now growing so fast, and brought his brother to his mind, Jerry replied:

'I came to tell you that Mr. Arthur has written the letter.'

'What letter?' Frank asked, for the moment forgetting the conversation he had held with the child in the Tramp House.

'The one I promised to bring you to show you--the one to Germany,' was Jerry's answer.

And then Frank remembered at once what, in the excitement of the diamond theft, had pa.s.sed from his mind.

'Yes, yes, I know; give it to me,' he said, advancing rapidly toward her, and putting out his hand. 'When did he write it? Give it to me, please.'

'But not to keep,' Jerry said, struck by something in his face and manner which, it seemed to her, meant danger to the letter.