but this air was stagnant. Alan had dropped his hat
on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, and
stuffed his gloves into his pocket.

A light in a single room, he thought, would not excite curiosity or
attract attention from the neighbors or any one passing in the street;
but lights in more than one room might do that. He resolved to turn
off the light in each room as he left it, before lighting the next one.

It had been a pleasant as well as a handsome house, if he could judge
by the little of it he could see, before the change had come over his
father. The rooms were large with high ceilings. The one where he
stood, obviously was a library; bookshelves reached three quarters of
the way to the ceiling on three of its walls except where they were
broken in two places by doorways, and in one place on the south wall by
an open fireplace. There was a big library table-desk in the center of
the room, and a stand with a shaded lamp upon it nearer the fireplace.
A leather-cushioned Morris chair--a lonely, meditative-looking
chair--was by the stand and at an angle toward the hearth; the rug in
front of it was quite worn through and showed the floor underneath. A
sympathy toward his father, which Sherrill had not been able to make
him feel, came to Alan as he reflected how many days and nights
Benjamin Corvet must have passed reading or thinking in that chair
before his restless feet could have worn away the tough, Oriental
fabric of the rug.

There were several magazines on the top of the large desk, some
unwrapped, some still in their wrappers; Alan glanced at them and saw
that they all related to technical and scientific subjects. The desk
evidently had been much used and had many drawers; Alan pulled one open
and saw that it was full of papers; but his sensation as he touched the
top one made him shut the drawer again and postpone prying of that sort
until he had looked more thoroughly about the house.

He went to the door of the connecting room and looked into it. This
room, dusky in spite of the light which shone past him through the wide
doorway, was evidently another library; or rather it appeared to have
been the original library, and the front room had been converted into a
library to supplement it. The bookcases here were built so high that a
little ladder on wheels was required for access to the top shelves.
Alan located the light switch in the room; then he returned, switched