'Oh, I can't do it—I can't! It would be mean to Mr. Arthur,' she thought; and returning him the letter, she said: 'Please post it yourself; then you will be sure, and I might lose it, or forget. I am careless sometimes. Don't ask me to take it.'
She was pleading with her might; but Arthur paid no heed, and only laughed at her fears.
'I know you will not forget, and I'd rather trust you than Charles. Surely, you will not refuse to do so small a favor for me?'
'No,' she said, at last, as she put the letter in her pocket, with the thought that, after all, there might be no harm in showing it to Mr. Frank, who, of course, merely wished to see it, and would not think of keeping it.
But she did not know Frank Tracy or guess how great was his anxiety lest any message should ever reach a friend of Gretchen, if friend there were living. She found him in the room he called his office, where the dead woman had lain in her coffin, and where he often sat alone thinking of the day when the inquest was held, and when he took his first step in the downward road, which had led him so far that now it seemed impossible to turn back, even had he wished to do so, as he sometimes did.
'If I had never secreted the photograph, or the book with the handwriting, if I had shown them to Arthur, everything would have been so different, and I should have been free,' he was thinking, when Jerry knocked timidly at the door, rousing him from his reverie, and making him start with a nameless tsar which was always haunting him.
'Oh, Jerry, it is you,' he said, as the little girl crossed the threshold, and shutting the door, stood with her back against it, and her hands behind her. 'What is it?' he asked, as he saw her hesitating.
With a quick, jerky movement of the head, which set in motion the little rings of hair, now growing so fast, and brought his brother to his mind, Jerry replied:
'I came to tell you that Mr. Arthur has written the letter.'
'What letter?' Frank asked, for the moment forgetting the conversation he had held with the child in the Tramp House.