He looked over the top of his book at her.

“I thought you said you stopped the stream at its source.  Now you propose to let it run down to me—­or up to me:  how do you know it will not run past me?”

“Now don’t talk in that way,” she said, “this is something you will want to know,” and she related what Harriet had chronicled.

VIII

When she had left the room, he put back into its place the volume he was reading:  its power over him was gone.  All the voices of all his books, speaking to him from lands and ages, grew simultaneously hushed.  He crossed the library to a front window opening upon the narrow rocky street and sat with his elbow on the window-sill, the large fingers of one large hand unconsciously searching his brow—­that habit of men of thoughtful years, the smoothing out of the inner problems.

The home of Professor Hardage was not in one of the best parts of the town.  There was no wealth here, no society as it impressively calls itself; there were merely well-to-do human beings of ordinary intelligence and of kindly and unkindly natures.  The houses, constructed of frame or of brick, were crowded wall against wall along the sidewalk; in the rear were little gardens of flowers and of vegetables.  The street itself was well shaded; and one forest tree, the roots of which bulged up through the mossy bricks of the pavement, hung its boughs before his windows.  Throughout life he had found so many companions in the world outside of mere people, and this tree was one.  From the month of leaves to the month of no leaves—­the period of long hot vacations—­when his eyes were tired and his brain and heart a little tired also, many a time it refreshed him by all that it was and all that it stood for—­this green tent of the woods arching itself before his treasured shelves.  In it for him were thoughts of cool solitudes and of far-away greenness; with tormenting visions also of old lands, the crystal-aired, purpling mountains of which, and valleys full of fable, he was used to trace out upon the map, but knew that he should never see or press with responsive feet.

For travel was impossible to him.  Part of his small salary went to the family of a brother; part disappeared each year in the buying of books—­at once his need and his passion; there were the expenses of living; and Miss Anna always exacted appropriations.

“I know we have not much, but then my little boys and girls have nothing; and the poor must help the poorer.”

“Very well,” he would reply, “but some day you will be a beggar yourself, Anna.”

“Oh, well then, if I am, I do not doubt that I shall be a thrifty old mendicant.  And I’ll beg for you!  So don’t you be uneasy; and give me what I want.”

She always looked like a middle-aged Madonna in the garb of a housekeeper.  Indeed, he was wont to call her the Madonna of the Dishes; but at these times, and in truth for all deeper ways, he thought of her as the Madonna of the Motherless.  Nevertheless he was resolute that out of this many-portioned salary something must yet be saved.