She had never known a playmate.  The children of the college circle went to school in town, while she, from her sixth year, was taught systematically by her grandfather.  The faithful oversight of Mary, the maid-of-all-work, constituted Sylvia’s sole acquaintance with anything approximating maternal care.  Mary, unknown to Sylvia and Professor Kelton, sometimes took counsel—­the privilege of her long residence in the Lane—­of some of the professors’ wives, who would have been glad to help directly but for the increasing reserve that had latterly marked Professor Kelton’s intercourse with his friends and neighbors.

Sylvia was vaguely aware of the existence of social distinctions, but in Buckeye Lane these were entirely negligible; they were, in fact, purely academic, to be studied with other interesting phenomena by spectacled professors in quiet laboratories.  It may, however, be remarked that Sylvia had sometimes gazed, not without a twinge, upon the daughter of a village manufacturer whom she espied flashing through the Lane on a black pony, and this young person symbolized all worldly grandeur to Sylvia’s adoring vision.  Sylvia knew the world chiefly from her reading,—­Miss Alcott’s and Mrs. Whitney’s stories at first, and “St. Nicholas” every month, on a certain day that found her meeting the postman far across the campus; and she had read all the “Frank” books,—­the prized possessions of a neighbor’s boy,—­from the Maine woods through the gunboat and prairie exploits of that delectable hero.  At fourteen she had fallen upon Scott and Bulwer and had devoured them voraciously during the long vacation, in shady corners of the deserted campus; and she was now fixing Dickens’s characters ineffaceably in her mind by Cruikshank’s drawings.  She was well grounded in Latin and had a fair reading knowledge of French and German.  It was true of Sylvia, then and later, that poetry did not greatly interest her, and this had been attributed to her undoubted genius for mathematics.  She was old for her age, people said, and the Lane wondered what her grandfather meant to do with her.

The finding of Professor Kelton proves to be, as Sylvia had surmised, a simple matter.  He is at work in a quiet alcove of the college library, a man just entering sixty, with white, close-trimmed hair and beard.  The eyes he raises to his granddaughter are like hers, and there is a further resemblance in the dark skin.  His face brightens and his eyes kindle as he clasps Sylvia’s slender, supple hand.

“It must be a student—­are you sure he isn’t a student?”

Sylvia was confident of it.

“Very likely an agent, then.  They’re very clever about disguising themselves.  I never see agents, you know, Sylvia.”

Sylvia declared her belief that the stranger was not an agent, and the professor glanced at his book reluctantly.

“Very well; I will see him.  I wish you would run down these references for me, Sylvia.  Don’t trouble about those I have checked off.  It can’t be possible I am following a false clue.  I’m sure I printed that article in the ‘Popular Science Monthly,’ for I recall perfectly that John Fiske wrote me a letter about it.  Come home when you have finished and we’ll take our usual walk together.”