Here she began to sob again, and laying her hand pityingly upon the bowed head, Jerrie said:
"Yes, I know; I understand. Something from Tom Tracy would have pleased you more than from any one else; but listen to me, Annie. Tom is not worth your tears."
"Don't you care for him?" the girl asked, lifting her head suddenly.
"Not a particle, as you mean. You have nothing to fear from me," Jerrie replied.
This was a grain of comfort to the girl who had been weak enough to waste her affections upon Tom Tracy, and to hope that she might eventually succeed in bringing him to her feet, for she knew his fondness for money, and that she should in all probability be one day the heiress of a million. So great was her infatuation for the man who had never shown her the slightest attention, that even his flowers, though second-hand, and not intended for her, were everything to her, and when she packed her trunk that night she put them carefully away in many wrappings of paper, to be brought out at home in the privacy of her own room, and kept as long as the least beauty or perfume remained.
It was a very merry party which the New York train carried to Shannondale the next day, and Jerrie was the merriest and gayest of them all, bandying jokes, and jests, and coquetting pretty equally with the young men, until neither Tom, nor Dick, nor Billy, quite knew what he was doing or saying. But always, in her gayest moods, when her eyes were brightest, and her wit the keenest, there was in Jerrie's heart a thought of Harold, who had so disappointed her, and a wonder as to the nature of the job which had been of sufficient importance to keep him from Vassar.
"'Shingling a roof, and Maude is helping him,'" Billy said. "I wonder what he meant?" she was thinking, when she heard Ann Eliza cry out that the towers of 'Le Bateau' were visible.
As she had not seen that wonderful structure since its completion, she arose from her seat, and going to the window, looked out upon the massive pile in the distance, looking, with its turrets, and towers, and round projections, like some old castle rather than a home where people could live and be happy.
"It is very grand," she said to Ann Eliza; and Billy, who was leaning toward her, replied:
"Yes, too grand for a Pe-Peterkin. It wants you there, Jerrie, as its m-m-master-p-p-piece, and, by Jove, you can b-be there, too, if you will!"