. He'd just
come down from your room. You were ill, you know: diphtheria. Mother
passed it to him without a word, the way people do when there are
children in the room. He looked at it and then at her, and they nodded.
I was little, you know, but I saw it was important, and I listened. And
father said: 'No, it won't do to have it lying around. I'll carry it up
attic and put it in the red chest.' That's what I mean, Charlotte," she
continued, turning to Charlotte, who stood with a frown of concentration
on her smooth forehead. "You know that old red chest, the one where
uncle's book was put."

"Oh, yes," said Charlotte. "I know the old chest."

"Well," said Amelia conclusively, having made her point, "then you go up
attic, will you, and open the chest, take out the blank book and bring
it down."

"Nonsense!" said Raven. "Charlotte's got her hands full. I'll run up by
and by."

Charlotte gave him a serious, perhaps a warning look, he remembered
afterward, and went out of the room.

"You recall it, don't you," Amelia continued, "how you had diphtheria
after Uncle John's death, and father had it next week."

"Yes," said Raven, tasting the unchanged bitterness of an old misery.

That had been one of the points where his life turned. His father had
taken the infection from him and nearly died, and the child he was then
had never been able to escape a shuddering belief that he might have
been guilty of his father's death. That had made him turn the more
passionately to the task of lightening his mother's burden in the wild
anxiety he had caused her. Poor little boy, he thought, poor little
fool! Making his life a business of compensating somebody for something,
and never, until these later years, even seeing the visible path his own
feet should have taken. He forgot Amelia and showed himself so absent
that she got huffy and fell into silence and only when he left the room
did she remind him:

"Don't forget the journal. You'd better run up and look for it now."

He did go upstairs, really with an idea it might be best to run over the
journal before Amelia pounced on it and turned it, in some manner, to
his own undoing. At the head of the stairs stood Charlotte, waiting. One
hand was under her apron. She stepped silently into his room, tacitly
inviting him to follow, and brought out the hand and the mottled book.

"Here," she said. "Here 'tis. You lay it away safe some'r's. Don't seem
to me I'd let anybody see it, if