longings are but detached and wandering forms. From that time death had
held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to
fulfil one's present opportunities, had become charged with another
meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere
animal responsibility. The boy who had died was for him in a close, an
intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet
pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped
soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily
companionship with his thoughts.

Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an
insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye
for the invisible beauty. His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert
upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands--the hands of a
scholar and a thinker--were stretched, palms downward, on the rolled
arms of his chair. There was nothing in his appearance--nothing in his
worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant
lover, the impressionable dreamer. Yet in the innermost truth of his own
nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost
savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened
gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of
his regrets. "The little chap," as he always called the child, in his
thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its
nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own. Adams had lived day by
day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room,
had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he
might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have
learned. A boy to train, to educate, a mental companionship such as he
loved to fancy he would have found in a young, eager mind, had since his
marriage become the one burning desire of his heart, and even to-night