think you can find out what it was?"

The boy went to the bookcase and got out the books that had been touched,
and opened them at the pages which had been stroked.

The mother took him in her lap, and said:

"I will answer your question now, dear. I have found out that in one way
you are quite different from other people. You can see in the dark, you
can smell what other people cannot, you have the talents of a bloodhound.
They are good and valuable things to have, but you must keep the matter a
secret. If people found it out, they would speak of you as an odd child,
a strange child, and children would be disagreeable to you, and give you
nicknames. In this world one must be like everybody else if he doesn't
want to provoke scorn or envy or jealousy. It is a great and fine
distinction which has been born to you, and I am glad; but you will keep
it a secret, for mamma's sake, won't you?"

The child promised, without understanding.

All the rest of the day the mother's brain was busy with excited
thinkings; with plans, projects, schemes, each and all of them uncanny,
grim, and dark. Yet they lit up her face; lit it with a fell light of
their own; lit it with vague fires of hell. She was in a fever of
unrest; she could not sit, stand, read, sew; there was no relief for her
but in movement. She tested her boy's gift in twenty ways, and kept
saying to herself all the time, with her mind in the past: "He broke my
father's heart, and night and day all these years I have tried, and all
in vain, to think out a way to break his. I have found it now--I have
found it now."