'You posted that letter?'
Frank knew perfectly well that she meant the letter which, together with the photograph, and the Bible, and the lock of the baby's golden hair, had lain for years in his private drawer—the letter whose superscription he had studied so many times, and which had seldom been absent from his thoughts an hour since that night when, from her perch on the gate-post, Jerrie had startled him with the question she was asking him now. But be affected ignorance and said, as indifferently as he could, with those blue eyes upon him seeming to read his inmost thoughts:
'What letter do you mean?'
'Why, the one Mr. Arthur wrote to Gretchen, or her friends, in Wiesbaden, and gave me to post. You took it for me to the office, and I sat on the gate so long in the darkness waiting for you to come and tell me you had posted it sure.'
'Oh, yes, I remember it perfectly, and how you frightened me sitting up there so high like a goblin,' Frank answered, falteringly, his face as crimson now as Jerrie's, and his eyes dropping beneath her gaze.
'Gretchen's friends never got that letter,' Jerrie continued.
'No, they never got it,' Frank answered, mechanically.
'If they had,' Jerrie went on, 'they would have answered it, for she had friends there.'
Frank looked up quickly and curiously at the girl talking so strangely to him. What had she heard? What did she know? or was this only an outburst of insanity? She certainly looked crazy as she lay there talking to him. He was sure of it a moment after when, as if the nature of her thoughts had changed suddenly, she said to him:
'Yes, you have been very kind to me, you and Maude—you and Maude—and I shan't forget it. Tell her I shan't forget it.—I shan't forget it.'