"Where are you going?" she gasped, as Jerrie turned toward the door.
"To Tracy Park, to claim my own and clear Harold!" was the reply. "When I come back I will tell you all, but now I can't wait."
"But, Jerrie, you are not strong enough to walk there, and besides, they have company this afternoon, some kind of a new-fangled card party, and you must not go," Mrs. Crawford said.
"I have the strength of twenty horses," Jerrie replied, "and if they have company, so much the better, for there will be more to hear my story. Good-by."
She was off like an arrow, and went almost upon a run through the woods until the house was reached, and then she stopped a moment to take breath and look about her. How fair and beautiful was every thing, and Jerrie's heart beat so hard that she felt for a moment as if she were choking to death as she sat under a maple tree and tried to think it all over, to make sure there was no mistake. Opening the box she took out two papers and read them again as she had the night she was taken sick. One was a certificate of marriage, the other of a birth and baptism; there was no mistake.
Holding the papers in one hand and the bag in the other, she went on to the house, from which shouts of laughter were issuing, Nina's voice, and Marian's, and Tom's, and Dick's, and Mrs. Tracy's. She could hear that distinctly, and she shuddered a little at the sound, for it brought back to her mind all the slights she had received from that woman who was so cruel to Harold, and the pity which had been springing up in her heart ever since she looked at the windows of Maude's room and thought of the white-faced girl lying there, died out, and it was more a Nemesis than a gentle, forgiving woman who walked boldly into the hall and stood in the drawing-room door.
Mrs. Tracy was having a progressive euchre party that afternoon. A friend in Boston had written her about it, and, proud to be the first to introduce it in Shannondale, she stood, flushed and triumphant, with the restored diamonds in her ears and at her throat, laughing merrily at Judge St. Claire, who had won the booby prize—a little drum, as something he could beat—and who looked as if he did not quite see the joke.
Apart from the rest, Frank Tracy sat looking on, though with no apparent interest in the matter. He had joined in the game because his wife told him he must, and had borne meekly her sarcastic remarks when he trumped her ace and ordered up on nothing. His thoughts were not with the cards, but up stairs with Maude, who seemed to be better, and for whom there was constantly a prayer in his heart.
"Spare her, and I will make reparation; I will tell the truth."
He was trying to bribe the Lord to hear him, when he saw Jerrie in the door—tall, thin, and white from her recent sickness, with eyes which rolled and shone, and flashed as Arthur's did sometimes, and which fell at last upon Mrs. Tracy, where they rested with an intensity which must have drawn that lady's notice to her, if Frank had not exclaimed, as he rose to his feet: