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 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 all 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 she would show it to Mr. Frank as she had promised but would not let him keep it.
She found him in the room, 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 lead him so far that now it seemed impossible to turn back.
"If I had never secreted the photograph, or the book with the handwriting, 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 fear 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."