that a few days would make such a change in her.  The other morning I went up to her room with a little bunch of violets which I had gathered for her myself.  When she opened the door, I saw that she was packing her trunks.  And the dress she had ordered for Marguerite’s ball was lying on the bed ready to be put in.  As I gave her the flowers she stood looking at them a long time; then she kissed me without a word and quickly closed the door.”

When Harriet had gone.  Miss Anna sat awhile in her porch with a troubled face.  Then she went softly into the library, the windows of which opened out upon the porch.  Professor Hardage was standing on a short step-ladder before a bookcase, having just completed the arrangement of the top shelf.

“Are you never going to get down?” she asked, looking up at him fondly.

He closed the book with a snap and a sigh and descended.  Her anxious look recalled his attention,

“Did I not hear Harriet harrowing you up again with her troubles?” he asked.  “You poor, kind soul that try to bear everybody’s!”

“Never mind about what I bear!  What can you bear for dinner?”

“It is an outrage, Anna!  What right has she to make herself happier by making you miserable, lengthening her life by shortening yours?  For these worries always clip the thread of life at the end:  that is where all the small debts are collected as one.”

“Now you must not be down on Harriet!  It makes her happier; and as to the end of my life, I shall be there to attend to that.”

“Suppose I moved away with you to some other college entirely out of her reach?”

“I shall not suppose it because you will never do it.  If you did, Harriet would simply find somebody else to confide in; she must tell everything to somebody.  But if she told any one else, a good many of these stories would be all over town.  She tells me and they get no further.”

“What right have you to listen to scandal in order to suppress it?”

“I don’t even listen always:  I merely stop the stream at its source.”

“I object to your offering your mind as the banks to such a stream.  Still I’m glad that I live near the banks,” and he kissed his hand to her.

“When one woman tells another anything and the other woman does not tell, remember it is not scandal—­it is confidence.”

“Then there is no such thing as confidence,” he replied, laughing.

He turned toward his shelves.

“Now do rest,” she pleaded, “you look worn out.”

She had a secret notion that books instead of putting life into people took it out of them.  At best they performed the function of grindstones:  they made you sharper, but they made you thinner—­gave you more edge and left you less substance.

“I wish every one of those books had a lock and I had the bunch of keys.”

“Each has a lock and key; but the key cannot be put into your pocket, Anna, my dear; it is the unlocking mind.  And you are not to speak of books as a collection of locks and keys; they make up the living tree of knowledge, though of course there is very little of the tree in this particular bookcase.”