“Petrofsky’s wife, poor thing, died since they come here, and now there’s only Stefan, he’s the father, and Ivan, he’s the boy.  He’s awful smart they say, and Stefan, he’s about kilt himself to get the boy through the high school.  He graduated this spring and now Stefan he says he wants him to get some more education.  He says their family, back in Russia, was real gentry and he wants Ivan to learn a lot so that he can help the poor Roosians who come here to do the right thing by the government—­”

“_ What_?” asked J.M.  “I don’t seem to catch his idea.”

“Well, no more do I, sorra bit,” confessed Mrs. McCartey serenely.  “Not a breath of what he meant got to me, but what he said was that Ivan’s schoolin’ had put queer ideas in his head to be an anarchist or somethin’ and he thought that maybe more schoolin’ would drive out thim ideas and put in other ones yet.  Hasn’t it a foolish sound, now?” She appealed to J .M. for a sympathy she did not get.

“It sounds like the most interesting case I ever heard of,” he cried, with a generous looseness of superlative new to him.  “Is Ivan that tall, shy, sad-looking boy who goes with his father to work?”

“That’s him.  An’ plays the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of your body, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin’.  His father, he says he don’t know what to do with him ...  There’s a big, bad devil of a Polack down to the works that wants him to join the anarchists in the fall and go to——­”

J.M. rose to his feet and hurried down the porch toward the Petrofsky wing of the house, addressing himself to the tall, grave-faced figure in the doorway.  “Oh, Mr. Petrofsky, may I have a few minutes’ talk with you about your son?” he said.

III

The registrar of Middletown College, being a newcomer, saw nothing unusual in the fact that the librarian came to his office on matriculation day to enroll as a freshman a shy, dark-eyed lad with a foreign name; but the president and older professors were petrified into speechlessness by the news that old J.M. had returned from parts unknown with a queer-looking boy, who called the old man uncle.  Their amazement rose to positive incredulity when they heard that the fastidious, finical old bachelor had actually installed a raw freshman in one of his precious tower-rooms, always before inexorably guarded from the mildest and most passing intrusion on their hallowed quiet.

The president made all haste to call on J.M. and see the phenomenon with his own eyes.  As discreetly as his raging curiosity would allow him, he fell to questioning the former recluse.  When he learned that J.M. had spent six weeks in Woodville, no more explanation seemed needed.  “Oh, of course, your old home?”

“Yes,” said J.M., “my old home.”

“And you had a warm welcome there, I dare say?”