"Begin. What did Gretchen write?"
Jerrie felt that she could not stand through the interview, and, bringing a low ottoman to Arthur's side, seated herself upon it just where she could look into his face and detect every change in it.
"Let me tell you of Gretchen as she was when you first knew her," she said, "and then you will be better able to judge of the truth of all I know."
He did not reply, and she went on:
"Gretchen was very young—sixteen or seventeen—when you first saw her knitting in the sunshine under the trees in Wiesbaden, and very beautiful, too—so beautiful that you went again and again to look at her and talk to her, until you came to love her very much, and told her so at last; but you seemed so much above her that she could not believe you at first. At last, however, you made her understand, and when her mother died suddenly——"
"Her mother was Mrs. Heinrich, and kept a kind of fancy store," Arthur interposed, as if anxious that nothing should be omitted.
"Yes, she kept a fancy store," Jerrie rejoined; "and when she died suddenly and left Gretchen alone, you said to her, 'We must be married at once,' and you were, in the little English chapel, by the Rev. Mr. Eaton, who was then rector."
Here Arthur's eyes opened wide and fixed themselves wonderingly upon Jerrie, as he said:
"Are you the old Harry that you know all this? But go on; don't stop; it all comes back to me so plain when I hear you tell it. She wore a straw bonnet trimmed with blue, and a white dress, but took it off directly for a black one because her mother was dead. Did she tell you that?"
"No," Jerrie replied. "She told me nothing of the dress, only how happy she was with you, whom she loved so much, and who loved her and made her so happy for a time that earth seemed like heaven to her, and then——"