'That is the name of the child's things in the bag,' Mrs. Crawford said.
'Of course it is baby's, then,' Harold replied; 'but, I shall call her Jerry for short, even if it is a boy's name, and so my little lady, I christen you Jerry;' and kissing the forehead, the eyes, the nose, and the chin, he marked the shape of the cross upon the face upturned to his, and named his baby 'Jerry.'
Later, when he knew more of the world, he would change the 'y' into 'ie,' but now she was simply Jerry, and when he called her that she laughed and nodded as if the sound were not new to her. She was a beautiful child, with complexion as pure as wax, and eyes which might have borrowed their color from the blue lakes of Italy, or from the skies of England when they are at their brightest.
'I wish she could talk to me. I suppose she must speak French,' he said, as he was trying in vain to make her understand him. 'Don't you know a word I say?' he asked her, and her reply was what sounded to him like 'We, we.'
'That's English,' he cried, delighted with her progress, but when he spoke to her again, her answer was, 'Yah, yah,' which seemed to him so nonsensical that after a few attempts to make her say 'yes,' and to teach her what it meant, he gave up his lesson for the remainder of the day and talked to her by signs and gestures which she seemed to understand.
Whatever he did she did, and he saw her more than once imitating his grandmother's motions as well as his own, to the life.
Late in the afternoon Mr. St. Claire came to the cottage, curious to see the child, who, at sight of him, retreated behind Harold, and then peered shyly up at him, with a look in her great blue eyes which puzzled him on the instant, as one is frequently puzzled with a likeness to something or somebody he tries in vain to recall. In this instance it was hardly the eyes themselves, but rather the way they looked at him, and the sweep of the long lashes, together with a firm shutting together of the lips, which struck Mr. St. Claire as familiar, and when with a swift movement of her little hand, she swept the mass of golden hair back from her forehead, he would have sworn that he had seen that trick a thousand times, and yet he could not place it. That she was the child of the dead woman he believed, and as the mother was French, so also was she. He had once passed two years in France, and was master of the language; so he spoke to the child in French, but though she seemed to understand him she made no reply, until he said to her:
'Where is your mother, little one?'
'Then she answered, promptly, 'Dead,' but the language was German, not French.
'Ho-ho! You are a little Dutchman,' Mr. St. Claire said, with some surprise in his voice.