For a moment her mind was tolerably clear, and she said to him abruptly, while she held his gaze steadily with her bright eyes:
"You posted that letter?"
Frank knew perfectly well that she meant the letter whose superscription he had studied so many times, and which had seldom been absent from his thoughts an hour since that night when, from her perch on the gate-post, Jerrie had startled him with the question she was asking him now. But he affected ignorance and said, as indifferently as he could:
"What letter do you mean?"
"Why, the one Mr. Arthur wrote to Gretchen, or her friends, in Wiesbaden, and gave me to post. You took it for me to the office, and I sat on the gate so long waiting for you to come and tell me you had posted it sure."
"Oh, yes, I remember it, and how you frightened me sitting up there so high like a goblin," Frank answered, falteringly, his face as crimson now as Jerrie's, and his eyes dropping beneath her gaze.
"Gretchen's friends never got that letter," Jerrie continued.
"No, they never got it," Frank answered mechanically.
"If they had," Jerrie went on, "they would have answered it, for she had friends there."
Frank looked up quickly at the girl talking so strangely to him. What had she heard? What did she know? or was this only an outburst of insanity? She certainly looked crazy as she lay there talking to him. He was sure of it a moment after when she said to him as he arose to go: