Gretchen: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

His manner frightened her; perhaps the bumble-bees were coming out, and she drew back from him, forgetting entirely what she had said.

"It was a German word," he continued, "and the accent is German, too. Can you speak it?"

Unconsciously, as he talked, he dropped into that language, while Jerry listened, with a strained look on her face, as if trying to recall something which came and went, but went more than it came, if that could be.

"I talked that once," she said, "when I lived with mamma; but she is dead. Harold found her, and I put flowers on her grave."

Half the time she was speaking in German, or trying to, and Arthur listened in amazement, while his interest in her deepened every moment, as he took her through the rooms and showed her "the marble people with nothing on them," and the beautiful pictures which adorned his walls.

"How would you like to come and be my little girl?" he asked her at last, when, remembering Harold and the cherries, she told him she must go, and started toward the window, as if she would make her egress as she had come in.

"Can Harold come, too? I can't leave Harold," she said. Then, as she caught sight of him still standing at a distance, gazing curiously up at the window through which she had disappeared, she called out: "Yes, Harold, I'm coming. I've seen him and everything, and he did not hurt me. Good-by!" and she turned toward Arthur with a little nod.

Then, before he could stop her, she sprang out upon the ladder, and went down faster than she had come up, leaving the pail of cherries, and leaving, too, in Arthur's breast a tumult of emotions which he could not define.

That night, when Frank, who had heard of Jerry's visit to his brother, went up to see him, he found him more cheerful and natural than he had seen him in weeks. As Frank expected, his first words were of the little girl who had come to him through the window and left him the cherries, of which he said he had eaten so many that he feared they might make him sick. What did Frank know of the child? What had he learned of her history? Of course he had made inquiries everywhere?

It was just in the twilight, before the gas was lighted, and so Arthur did not see how his brother's face flushed at first, and then grew white as he recapitulated what the reader already knows, dwelling at length upon the inquiries he had made in New York, all of which had been fruitless. There was the name Jerrine on the child's clothing, he said, and the initials "N.B." on that of her mother, who was evidently French, although she must have come from Germany.