"'I shall not forget you, mother:
I shall hear you when you pass,
With your feet above my head
In the long and pleasant grass.'"
"I saw her cry one day when I read that to her. Poor little Maude! She is very frail, but no one seems to think her in danger, she has so brilliant a color, and always seems so bright."
Jerrie read this letter two or three times, and each time with an increased sense of comfort. No man who really loved a girl could speak of her mental weakness to another as Harold had spoken of Maude's to her, and it might be after all that he merely thought of her as a friend, whom he had always known. So the cloud was lifted in part, and she only felt a great anxiety for Maude's health, which, as the spring advanced, grew stronger, so that it was almost certain that she would come to Vassar in the summer and see her friend graduated.
Such was the state of affairs when Nina repeated to Jerrie what Harold had said to her at the musicale the previous winter. All day long there was a note of gladness in Jerrie's heart which manifested itself in snatches of song, and low, warbling, whistled notes, which sounded more as if they came from a canary's than from a human throat.
"Whistling Jerrie," the girls sometimes called her, but she rather liked the name, and whistled on whenever she felt like it.
And it was a very joyous, happy song she trilled, as she thought of Harold's compliment, and of the approaching time when he would, of course, be there to see and hear, and as, in his valedictory of two years before there had been in every line a thought of her, so in her essay, which was peculiarly German in its method and handling, thoughts of Harold were interwoven. She knew she should receive a surfeit of applause—she always did; but if Harold's were wanting the whole thing would be a failure. So she wrote him frequently, urging him to come, and he always replied that nothing but necessity would keep him from doing so.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE TWO FACES IN THE MIRROR.
TOWARD the last of May Arthur came to Vassar, bringing with him the graduating dress which he had bought in New York, with Maude as his adviser. He had Jerrie at the hotel to spend Saturday and Sunday with him, and took her to drive and to shop, and then in the evening asked her to put on her finery, that he might see how it looked.