n out of the room.

Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door.
There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand.

"Now you look like yourself," she said, regarding him with approval
as he sat reading before the bookcase. "I started to tell you what
Harriet told me."

He looked over the top of his book at her.

"I thought you said you stopped the stream at its source. Now you
propose to let it run down to me--or up to me: how do you know it
will not run past me?"

"Now don't talk in that way," she said, "this is something you will
want to know," and she related what Harriet had chronicled.

VIII

When she had left the room, he put back into its place the volume
he was reading: its power over him was gone. All the voices of all
his books, speaking to him from lands and ages, grew simultaneously
hushed. He crossed the library to a front window opening upon the
narrow rocky street and sat with his elbow on the window-sill, the
large fingers of one large hand unconsciously searching his
brow--that habit of men of thoughtful years, the smoothing out of
the inner problems.

The home of Professor Hardage was not in one of the best parts of
the town. There was no wealth here, no society as it impressively
calls itself; there were merely well-to-do human beings of ordinary
intelligence and of kindly and unkindly natures. The houses,
constructed of frame or of brick, were crowded wall against wall
along the sidewalk; in the rear were little gardens of flowers and
of vegetables. The street itself was well shaded; and one forest
tree, the roots of which bulged up through the mossy bricks of the
pavement, hung its boughs before his windows. Throughout life he
had found so many companions in the world outside of mere people,
and this tree was one. From the month of leaves to the month of no
leaves--the period of long hot vacations--when his eyes were tired
and his brain and heart a little tired also, many a time it
refreshed him by all that it was and all that it stood for--this
green tent of the woods arching itself before his treasured
shelves. In it for him were thoughts of cool solitudes and of
far-away greenness; with tormenting visions also of old lands, the
crystal-aired, purpling mountains of which, and valleys full of
fable, he was used to trace out upon the map, but knew that he
should never see or press with responsive feet.

For travel was impossible to him.