* * * * *

At dinner that day Edgar was silent and evidently under a cloud, and scarcely touched his food.  Frances Allan looked toward him anxiously and her husband suspiciously.  When his lack of appetite was remarked upon, he, truthfully enough, pleaded headache.  Mrs. Allan was all sympathy at once.

“You study too hard, dear,” she said.  “You may have a holiday tomorrow if you like, and go and spend the day in the country with Rosalie and the Mackenzies.”

“No, no,” replied the boy.  “I’ll just stay quiet, in my room, this evening.  I’ll be all right by tomorrow.”

“What have you been eating?” demanded John Allan, gruffly.

“Nothing, since breakfast, Sir,” was the reply.

“Headaches are for nervous women.  When a healthy boy complains of one, and declines dinner, it generally means that he has been robbing somebody’s strawberry patch or up a cherry-tree, stuffing half-ripe fruit,” he said in the acid, suspicious tone that the boy knew.  It was beyond John Allan’s powers to imagine any but physical causes for a boy’s ailments.

* * * * *

Not until the door of his own little bed-room was closed behind him did Edgar Poe even try to collect his thoughts.  Then he sat down at his window and looked out over the fragrant garden to the quiet sky, contemplation of which had so often soothed his spirit, and tried to readjust the inner world he lived in, in accordance with the discovery he had just made.  A first such readjustment his world had experienced three years before, when Mr. Allan had taunted him with his dependence upon charity.  Before that time the world, as he knew it, had held only love and beauty—­sorrow, as he had seen it, being but a solemn and poetic form of beauty.  The change in such a world made by the discovery that his being an adopted son set him apart in a class different from other boys—­a class unlovely and loveless—­had been great, had stolen much of the joy from living; but he was very young then, and the joy of mere living and breathing was strong in his blood, and he had gradually become accustomed—­hardened, if you will—­to the idea of his dependence upon charity.

But here was a change far more terrible, and coming at a time when he was old enough to feel it far more keenly.  He was indeed, in a class by himself—­he was held in contempt because of what his angel mother had been!  His holy of holies had been profaned, the sacred fire that warmed his inner life had been spat upon.  It seemed he had been from the beginning despised, though he had not dreamed it, for that which he held most dear—­of which he was most proud.  The little, aristocratic, puffed-up world he lived in would doubtless always despise him; but that was because of its narrowness and ignorance for which he, in turn, would despise it.  With the whimsical, half-belief he had always had that the dead remain conscious through their long sleep, he