‘Yes,’ he said, looking up quickly and eagerly; ’that is it.  I am trying to remember something which, it seems to me, I ought to remember; but I cannot, and the more I try, the farther it gets from me.  Do you know what it is?’

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.

‘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.