Mrs. Baxter’s little stroke of diplomacy had gone straight to the mark, she was a woman of insight.  For every reason she was well content to have her son spend his evenings at home, though it cannot be claimed that his presence enlivened the household, his condition being one of strange, trancelike irascibility.  Evening after evening passed, while he sat dreaming painfully of Mr. Parcher’s porch; but in the daytime, though William did not literally make hay while the sun shone, he at least gathered a harvest somewhat resembling hay in general character.

Thus: 

One afternoon, having locked his door to secure himself against intrusion on the part of his mother or Jane, William seated himself at his writing-table, and from a drawer therein took a small cardboard box, which he uncovered, placing the contents in view before him upon the table. (How meager, how chilling a word is “contents"!) In the box were: 

A faded rose.

Several other faded roses, disintegrated into leaves.

Three withered “four-leaf clovers.”

A white ribbon still faintly smelling of violets.

A small silver shoe-buckle.

A large pearl button.

A small pearl button.

A tortoise-shell hair-pin.

A cross-section from the heel of a small slipper.

A stringy remnant, probably once an improvised wreath of daisies.

Four or five withered dandelions.

Other dried vegetation, of a nature now indistinguishable.

William gazed reverently upon this junk of precious souvenirs; then from the inner pocket of his coat he brought forth, warm and crumpled, a lumpish cluster of red geranium blossoms, still aromatic and not quite dead, though naturally, after three hours of such intimate confinement, they wore an unmistakable look of suffering.  With a tenderness which his family had never observed in him since that piteous day in his fifth year when he tried to mend his broken doll, William laid the geranium blossoms in the cardboard box among the botanical and other relics.

His gentle eyes showed what the treasures meant to him, and yet it was strange that they should have meant so much, because the source of supply was not more than a quarter of a mile distant, and practically inexhaustible.  Miss Pratt had now been a visitor at the Parchers’ for something less than five weeks, but she had made no mention of prospective departure, and there was every reason to suppose that she meant to remain all summer.  And as any foliage or anything whatever that she touched, or that touched her, was thenceforth suitable for William’s museum, there appeared to be some probability that autumn might see it so enlarged as to lack that rarity in the component items which is the underlying value of most collections.

William’s writing-table was beside an open window, through which came an insistent whirring, unagreeable to his mood; and, looking down upon the sunny lawn, he beheld three lowly creatures.  One was Genesis; he was cutting the grass.  Another was Clematis; he had assumed a transient attitude, curiously triangular, in order to scratch his ear, the while his anxious eyes never wavered from the third creature.