mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some
Emerson, something more of "Faust," with such dashes of Longfellow and
Ruskin as seemed to express his soul. He never wrote to Ellen of
money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had
written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the
night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages. Then he
mailed Ellen Culpepper's letter, and was a lover living in an ethereal
world as he walked home babbling her name in whispers to the stars.
Often when this mood was not upon him, and a letter was due to Ellen,
he went downstairs in the house where he lived and played the piano to
bring her near to him. That never failed to change his face as by a
miracle. "When John comes upstairs," wrote Bob Hendricks to Molly, "he
is as one in a dream, with the mists of the music in his eyes. I never
bother him then. He will not speak to me, nor do a thing in the world,
until that letter is written, sealed, and stamped. Then he gets up,
yawns and smiles sheepishly and perhaps hits me with a book or punches
me with his fist, and then we wrestle over the room and the bed like
bear cubs. After the wrestle he comes back to himself. I wonder why?"

And Ellen Culpepper read those letters from John Barclay over and
over, and curiously enough she understood them; for there is a
telepathy between spirits that meet as these two children's souls had
met, and in that concord words drop out and only thoughts are
merchandized. Her spirit grew with his, and so "through all the world
she followed him."

But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched
his bedfellow and whispered, "Bob, Bob--look, look." When the
awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp,
"Don't you see Ellen--there--there by the table?" But whatever it