ck
with it," he added.

"Golly, I wisht I c'ld stay home from Sunday school whenever I wanted
to," Larry envied. "How about us goin' swimmin', at the Canoe Club,
'safter?"

Allan thought fast. "Gee, I wisht I c'ld," he replied, lowering his
grammatical sights. "I gotta stay home, 'safter. We're expectin'
comp'ny; coupla aunts of mine. Dad wants me to stay home when they
come."

That went over all right. Anybody knew that there was no rational
accounting for the vagaries of the adult mind, and no appeal from adult
demands. The prospect of company at the Hartley home would keep Larry
away, that afternoon. He showed his disappointment.

"Aw, jeepers creepers!" he blasphemed euphemistically.

"Mebbe t'morrow," Allan said. "If I c'n make it. I gotta go, now; ain't
had breakfast yet." He scuffed his feet boyishly, exchanged so-longs
with his friend, and continued homeward.

* * * * *

As he had hoped, the Sunday paper kept his father occupied at breakfast,
to the exclusion of any dangerous table talk. Blake Hartley was still
deep in the financial section when Allan left the table and went to the
library. There should be two books there to which he wanted badly to
refer. For a while, he was afraid that his father had not acquired them
prior to 1945, but he finally found them, and carried them onto the
front porch, along with a pencil and a ruled yellow scratch pad. In his
experienced future--or his past-to-come--Allan Hartley had been
accustomed to doing his thinking with a pencil. As reporter, as novelist
plotting his work, as amateur chemist in his home laboratory, as
scientific warfare research officer, his ideas had always been clarified
by making notes. He pushed a chair to the table and built up the seat
with cushions, wondering how soon he would become used to the
proportional disparity between himself and the furniture. As he opened
the books and took his pencil in his hand, there was one thing missing.
If he could only smoke a pipe, now!

His father came out and stretched in a wicker chair with the _Times_
book-review section. The morning hours passed. Allan Hartley leafed
through one book and then the other. His pencil moved rapidly at times;
at others, he doodled absently. There was no question, any more, in his
mind, as to what or who he was. He was Allan Hartley, a man of
forty-three, marooned in his own thirteen-year-old body, thirty years
back in his own past. That was,