the name of a little sister of his mother's that died a child; and
again there were a few withered flowers, like little sad ghosts, stuck
through a paper on which was written his father's name--the name of
the sad, harsh, silent man whom Anthony had feared with all his heart.
Had those two, indeed, on some day of summer, walked to and fro, or
sate in some woodland corner, whispering sweet words of love together?
Anthony felt a sudden hunger of the heart for a woman's love, for
tender words to soothe his sadness, for the laughter and kisses of
children--and he began to ransack his mind for memories of his mother;
he could remember being pressed to her heart one morning when she lay
abed, with her fragrant hair falling about him. The worst was that he
must bear his sorrow alone, for there were none to whom he could talk
of such things. The doctor was as dry as an old bunch of herbs, and as
for the priest, Anthony was ashamed to show anything but contempt and
pride in his presence.

For relief he began to turn to a branch of his studies that he had
long disused; this was a fearful commerce with the unseen spirits.
Anthony could remember having practised some experiments of this kind
with the old Italian doctor; but he remembered them with a kind of
disgust, for they seemed to him but a sort of deadly juggling; and
such dark things as he had seen seemed like a dangerous sport with
unclean and coltish beings, more brute-like than human. Yet now he
read in his curious books with care, and studied the tales of
necromancers, who had indeed seemed to have some power over the souls
of men departed. But the old books gave him but little faith, and a
kind of angry disgust at the things attempted. And he began to think
that the horror in which such men as made these books abode, was not
more than the dark shadow cast on the mirror of the soul by their own
desperate imaginings and timorous excursions.

One day, a Sunday, he was strangely sad and heavy; he could settle to
nothing, but threw book after book aside, and when he turned to some
work of construction, his hand seemed to have lost its cunning. It was
a grey and sullen day in October; a warm wet wind came buffeting up
from the west, and roared in the chimneys and eaves of the old house.
The shrubs in the garden plucked themselves hither and thither as
though in pain. Anthony walked to and fro after his midday meal, which
he had eaten hastily and without savour; at last, as t