'None that I ever heard of,' Arthur replied. 'Why do you ask that?'
'And her name when a girl was Marguerite Heinrich, was it not?' Jerrie went on.
'Yes. Who told you that?' Arthur said.
'I saw it on a letter which you gave me to post years ago, when I was a child,' Jerrie replied. 'You never received an answer to that letter, did you?'
'What letter did you post for me to Marguerite Heinrich? I don't know what you mean,' Arthur said, the old worried look settling upon his face, which always came there when he was trying to recall something he ought to remember.
As he grew older he seemed to be annoyed when told of things he had forgotten, and as the letter had evidently gone entirely from his mind, Jerrie said no more of it. She remembered it well; and never dreaming that it had not been posted, she had watched a long time for an answer, which never came. Gretchen was dead; that was settled in her mind. But who was she? With the words, 'What if it were so?' still buzzing in her brain, the answer to this question was of vital importance to her, and after a moment, she continued, as if she had all the time been talking of Gretchen:
'She was Marguerite Heinrich when a girl in Wiesbaden, but she had another name afterward, when she was married.'
'You are talking of something you know nothing about. Can't you let Gretchen alone?' Arthur said, petulantly, and springing up he began to pace the room in a state of great excitement, while Jerrie sat motionless, with a white, stony look on her face and a far off look in her eyes, as if she were seeing in a vision things she could not retain, they passed to rapidly before her, and were so hazy and indistinct.
The likeness she had seen in the glass was gone now. She was not like Arthur at all; it was madness in her to have thought so. And she was not like Gretchen either. Her mother was lying under the little pine tree which she and Harold had planted above the lonely grave. Her mother had been dark, and coarse, and bony, and a peasant woman—so Ann Eliza Peterkin, who had heard it from her father, had told her once, when angry with her, and Harold, when sorely pressed, had admitted as much to her.
'Dark, with large, hard hands,' he had said; and Jerrie with the great tears shining in her eyes, had answered, indignantly: