Tracy Park: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

Jerry hesitated a moment, and then she asked:

'Is it the diamonds?'

'Diamonds! No. What diamonds? Didn't I tell you never to say diamonds to me again? I am tired of it,' he said, and in his eyes there was a gleam which Jerry had never seen there before when they rested upon her. It made her afraid, and she answered, meekly:

'Then I cannot help you to remember.'

'Of course not. No one can,' Arthur replied, in a softened tone. 'It is something long ago, and has to do with Gretchen.'

Then suddenly brightening, as if that name had been the key to unlock his misty brain, he added;

'I have it; I know; it has come to me at last! Gretchen always sets me right. I wrote her a letter long ago—a year, it seems to me—and it has never been posted. Strange that I should forget that; but something came up—I can't tell what—and drove it from my mind.'

As he talked he was opening and looking in the drawer which Jerry had never seen but once before, and that when he took from it the letter in German, a paragraph of which he had bidden her read.

'Here it is!' he said, joyfully, as he took out a sealed envelope and held it up to Jerry. 'This is the letter which you must post to-day. I can trust it to you.'

He gave her the letter, which she took with a beating heart and a sense of shame and regret as she remembered her pledge to Mr. Frank Tracy. She had promised to take him any letter which Mr. Arthur might intrust to her care, and if she took this one from Arthur she must keep her word.