It had been whispered in orthodox circles that Ware had amused himself one winter after his retirement by profanely feeding his theological library into the furnace.  However true this may be, few authors were represented in his library, and these were as far as possible compressed in one volume.  Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, Arnold, and Whittier were always ready to his hand; and he kept a supply of slender volumes of Sill’s “Poems” in a cupboard in the hall and handed them out discriminatingly to his callers.  The house was the resort of many young people, some of them children of Ware’s former parishioners, and he was much given to discussing books with them; or he would read aloud—­“Sohrab and Rustum,” Lowell’s essay on Lincoln, or favorite chapters from “Old Curiosity Shop”; or again, it might be a review article on the social trend or a fresh view of an old economic topic.  The Wares’ was the pleasantest of small houses and after Mrs. Owen’s the place sought oftenest by Sylvia.

“There’s a gentleman with Mr. Ware:  he’s been here a long time,” said the maid, lingering to lay a fresh stick of wood on the grate fire.

Sylvia, warming her hands at the blaze, heard the faint blur of voices from the parlor.  She surveyed the room with the indifference of familiarity, glanced at a new magazine, and then sat down at the desk and picked up a book she had never noticed before.  She was surprised to find it a copy of “Society and Solitude” that did not match the well-thumbed set of Emerson—­one of the few “sets” Ware owned.  She passed her hand over the green covers, that were well worn and scratched in places.  The fact that the minister boasted in his humorous way of never wasting money on bindings caused Sylvia to examine this volume with an attention she would not have given it in any other house.  On the fly leaf was written in pencil, in Ware’s rough, uneven hand, an inscription which covered the page, with the last words cramped in the lower corner.  These were almost illegible, but Sylvia felt her way through them slowly, and then turned to the middle of the book quickly with an uncomfortable sense of having read a private memorandum of the minister’s.  The margins of his books she knew were frequently scribbled over with notes that meant nothing whatever to any one but Ware himself.  After a moment her eyes sought again irresistibly the inscription.  She re-read it slowly:—­

“The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings; they have made them crooked paths; whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.  Tramping in Adirondacks.  Baptized Elizabeth at Harris’s.”

It was almost like eavesdropping to come in this way upon that curiously abrupt Ware-like statement of the minister’s:  “Tramping in Adirondacks.  Baptized Elizabeth at Harris’s.”