"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 at once."