He sat down in the big chair beside his desk, placed the book within reach, and kept touching it as he talked.

“I saw Mr. Thatcher,” said Sylvia.  “He seemed very much aroused.  I couldn’t help hearing a word now and then.”

“That’s all right, Sylvia.  I’ve known Thatcher for years, and last fall I went up to his house-boat on the Kankakee for a week’s shooting.  Allen and Dan Harwood were the rest of the party—­and I happened to tell the story of this little book—­an unfinished story.  We ought never to tell stories until they are finished.  And it seems that Thatcher, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, has been raking up the ashes of an old affair of Bassett’s with a woman, and he’s trying to hitch it on to the story I told him about this book.  He says by shaking this at Bassett he can persuade him that he’s got enough ammunition to blow him out of the water.  But I don’t believe a word of it; I won’t believe such a thing of Morton Bassett.  And even if I did, Thatcher can’t have that book.  I owe it to the woman whose baby I baptized up there in the hills to keep it.  And the woman may be living, too, for all I know.  I think of her pretty often.  She was game; wouldn’t tell anything.  If a man had deceived her she stood by him.  Whatever she was—­I know she was not bad, not a bit of it—­the spirit of the hills had entered into her—­and those are cleansing airs up there.  I suppose it all made the deeper impression on me because I was born up there myself.  When I strike Adirondacks in print I put down my book and think a while.  It’s a picture word.  It brings back my earliest childhood as far as I can remember.  I call words that make pictures that way moose words; they jump up in your memory like a scared moose in a thicket and crash into the woods like a cavalry charge.  I can remember things that happened when I was three years old:  one day father shot a deer in our cornfield and I recall it perfectly.  The general atmosphere of the old place steals over me yet.  The very thought of the pointed spruces, the feathery tamaracks, all the scents and sounds of summer, and the long, white winters, does my soul good now.  The old Hebrews understood the effect of landscape on character.  They knew most everything, those old chaps.  ’I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.’  Any strength there is in me dates back to the hills of my youth.  I’d like to go back there to die when the bugle calls.”

Mrs. Ware had not yet come in.  Ware lighted the lamp and freshened the fire.  While he was doing this, Sylvia moved to a chair by the table and picked up the book.  What Ware had said about the hills of his youth, the woods, the word tamarack that he had dropped carelessly, touched chords of memory as lightly as a breeze vibrates a wind harp.  Was this merely her imagination that had been stirred, or was it indeed a recollection?  Often before she had been moved by similar vague memories or longings,