In the morning Utterly sought Thomasina early. He looked about her beautiful room and out into the quiet garden and his hopes rose. Here was atmosphere! If he had only seen Miss Davis first, he might have saved a great deal of time. He had accounted to himself for her sudden silence the evening before. Mrs. Lister was within hearing and her morbid attitude toward the memory of her brother was doubtless known to her friends. He had brought with him the copies of "Willard's Magazine" and had laid them on the table beside him.

Thomasina, cool and pretty in a white dress, sat in a winged chair inside her garden door and rested her slippered feet on a footstool. The excitement had disappeared from her brown eyes, and she had evidently slept in the few hours which she had allowed herself.

Utterly, who arrived with such high hopes, went away in anger. Thomasina either would or could tell him nothing; insisted, indeed, that there was nothing to tell.

"He was brighter than other people and he did things in a different way—if Mrs. Scott really thinks he was 'wild' as you say, that is the source of her impression. But she is a newcomer, and—" Thomasina hesitated, flushed, and then said exactly what she had determined not to say—"if it were not for her husband's position she would be entirely outside the circle in which Basil Everman moved."

"But Mrs. Lister does not speak of him frankly; there's no gainsaying that!"

"I dare say she didn't approve of everything he said or did. Few sisters do wholly approve of their brothers. The style of Basil's writing would probably not have been appreciated by one brought up on Maria Edgeworth. But she loved him with her whole soul. Did you ever read Maria Edgeworth, Mr. Utterly? Do you know about 'Rosamund and the Purple Jar'?"

Utterly brushed Maria Edgeworth aside. He was certain that while Mrs. Lister had risen up like a stone wall against him, this person was laughing at him.

"Did Basil Everman come here?"

"A thousand times. I chased him under the piano usually. He was a very dignified, polite little boy, and I was a very undignified and impolite little girl."

"Miss Davis—" Utterly moved impatiently in his chair—"I have journeyed all the way from New York to be told that this really extraordinary young man, of whom this whole community ought to be proud, was chased round the leg of the piano and that he had gray eyes. What do you suppose would become of literary biography or of any sort of biography if all the relatives and friends of talented men acted as you do?"

"I dare say it would be greatly improved," said Thomasina, smiling. "I dare say many of the facts which make biographies interesting are inventions."

The nearer Utterly approached the railroad station and the farther the B. & N. train drew him from Waltonville, the more certain did he become that he had been cheated.

During the days following his visit, Mrs. Lister told her husband more about Basil. The facts came out gradually. To Dr. Lister the revelation was almost incredible. It was not that the facts were so startling, but that Mary Alcestis could have remained silent all these years of their married life: she who was so open, so confiding, so dependent upon him for advice and sympathy in everything.

As she proceeded with her story, he was still more astonished at her amazing conclusions.

"Basil was different from other children even when he was a little boy. I remember that my mother said that he used to require less sleep than other children, and that when she would go to his crib, she would find him lying awake and staring in the strangest way at nothing. She used to be afraid when he was a little boy that he might go blind, he looked at her so steadily. He never cried loudly like other children when he was tired or hungry, but sat with great tears rolling down his cheeks. Even as a little boy he liked to be alone. He was forever disappearing and being found in queer places, such as a pew in the college church in the dark. Sometimes he would sit alone in the dark tank room in the third story. He said he had 'strange thoughts' there.

"As he grew older, he would not accommodate himself to the ways of the household, would not come to meals regularly. He didn't seem to care whether he ate or not. He didn't come to breakfast on time, and he would not go to bed at the proper hour. Then my father said he could not have any breakfast, and my father took his lamp away at nine o'clock.

"He would not study the subjects which were assigned to him. It was almost intolerable to my father as president of the college. He would not even open his mathematics. He said life was too short. I believe that was the only time he ever said anything in answer to my father. He took punishment without even crying out."

"Punishment!" repeated Dr. Lister.

Mrs. Lister gasped. "Once or twice my father punished him—corporally.

"Once he went away on a walking trip to the Ragged Mountains alone. We didn't know where he had gone, and when people asked where he was, we had to—to invent. My father used to try to pretend that it made no difference, that he had done his best and that God would not hold him responsible. But I used to hear him at his window at night. He used to pray there.

"Basil used to go down and sit at the edge of the colored settlement and hear them sing. It was as though he let himself dwell on all evil things."

"Oh, mother, not evil things!" protested Dr. Lister.

"Some of the songs were evil. You could hear him singing them afterwards in his room. They were songs that made you shiver."

"Did he ever drink or gamble, or do anything of that kind?"

"I don't know certainly. My father kept some things from me. I know, though, that my father fetched him from the tavern once. He used to sing sometimes as he came home. You could hear him coming from far away."

"But, mother, surely you can see in 'Bitter Bread' why he went walking to the Ragged Mountains! He wanted new impressions, different impressions from those of humdrum people. Did you never suspect that he was trying to write? Did you never see anything he wrote? Didn't your father realize that here was no ordinary boy, here no ordinary talent?"

"My father found one of his stories and read it. It was then that he told Basil that he could not stay if he continued in his course. My father really didn't mean that he was to go away, but he took him at his word. Then we tried to find him again and again. His going away killed my father. All the clues led nowhere. We didn't hear anything about him till he was dead and buried. Then my father died." Mrs. Lister became excited. "I feel as though it would kill me. I thought at the time I couldn't live. Everything came at once."

"But, mother, it is all so long ago!"

"It is all as plain and dreadful as though it were yesterday. I have been afraid for twenty years that people would find out about Basil, that they would put this and that together. I have thought of Mrs. Scott finding it out and of how she would talk and talk and of all the tradespeople knowing, and—"

"But, my darling, what could they know?"

Mrs. Lister seemed suddenly to repent her vehemence.

"That he was alienated from us," said she. "Isn't that enough? And I shall never get over grieving for him. If he had done as my father wished he might have been here with us yet, and not be lying in his grave!"

"But he did live intensely. He probably got more happiness out of a day than ordinary mortals get out of a month. And you must learn not to grieve. It's unnatural. You have Richard and all your friends—and me!"

Mrs. Lister was slow to take comfort. For several days she did little but wander round the quiet house. It dawned upon her presently that the house was unusually quiet and that she had seen little of Richard since Commencement. In the thought of him she found at last her accustomed consolation. He was normal; he would give her no hours of misery as Basil had. He would do just what she wanted him to do—he was darling—even to think of him healed.

But where was Richard? Probably at Thomasina's. Mrs. Lister put on her bonnet and walked thither.

Richard was not there, and Thomasina in her trying way would talk of nothing but his musical talent. She had an annoying fashion of assuming that people agreed with her. When Mrs. Lister reached home, Richard had not come.

During the absence of his wife, Dr. Lister had visited the third story and looked through some of Basil's belongings. In the bottom of his little trunk lay his books, his tiny Euripides and his Æschylus with their poor print and their many notes. How strange it was to think of these books as the pocket companions of a young man! How mad to pick quarrels with any young man who went thus companioned!

The old bureau in which Mrs. Lister kept Basil's clothing was locked. From it came still a faint, indeterminate, sickening odor of disinfectants, and more faintly still that of tobacco. In the corner stood his stick, that stick which he had doubtless carried with him into the Ragged Mountains. Dr. Lister saw him suddenly, his cane held aloft like a banner, his eyes shining. He felt a chilling sensation along his spine. Then he smiled. Thus traditions of haunted rooms were established. The boy was dead, dead. Dr. Lister said the word aloud. The shrine was empty, deserted, forlorn.

For a long time he sat by the window in the dim, hot room. He meant to shake off the vague, uncanny sensations which he felt; he said to himself that he was too sober and too old for any such nonsense as this.

But while he sat still, his eyes now on the smooth white bed, now on a faded picture of Basil's mother above the bed, now on the bureau with its linen cover and its beadwork pincushion, his heart began to throb. He remembered a picture of Basil somewhere in the house, a picture brighter, younger, less severe than the one in the family album; he must ask Mary Alcestis to find it for him. He saw the boy, eager, alert, with a sort of strangeness about him as his sister had said, the unnatural product of this puritanic household in which he was set to grow. He did not like regular meals—even Dr. Lister had hated them in his youth. He had not liked to go to bed when other people went or to get up when they got up. Did any boy ever like it in the history of the world? His father had once or twice punished him—"corporally." A portrait of Dr. Everman hung in the library—it was difficult to fancy that delicate hand clutching a weapon, especially a weapon brandished over his own flesh and blood!

Dr. Lister was a placid person to whom the consciousness of immortality was not ever present. He had had few personal griefs; he had had little Christian experience; he was not quite certain, indeed, that immortality was desirable. But now there swept into his heart, along with a passionate grief for this forgotten lad, a passionate demand that he should not be dead, but that he should have made up to him somewhere, somehow, his loss of the sunshine and the pleasant breeze and the chance to go on with what was unquestionably remarkable work.

He wished, though from quite another reason than Mrs. Lister's, that the stranger had not come. The search could lead nowhere; the boy was dead and all his unborn works had perished with him. The thought of him hurt, and in spite of his admonitions to his wife, Dr. Lister mourned him.