He flung wide the massive front door and hastened through the spacious hall, up the stair and into the room where the ill man sat in an arm-chair.  On the threshold he paused for a moment.  Mr. Allan saw and recognized him, and at once the misunderstanding of the actions of his adopted son for which he seemed to have a gift, asserted itself, construing the visit as an unpardonable liberty.  The only motive Mr. Allan could imagine which could have prompted Edgar Poe to force himself, as it seemed to him, into his presence at this time was a mercenary one, and burning with indignation, his eyes gleaming with something like their old fire, he half raised himself from the chair.

“How dare you?” he screamed in the grating tones of angry old age.  Then, grasping the cane at his side in trembling fingers and raising it with threatening gesture, he ordered his visitor to leave the room at once.

Edgar Poe stood aghast for a moment, then fled down the stair and out of the door and turning his back for the last time upon the house whose young master he had been, with the word “Nevermore” ringing like a knell in his ears, made his way again to the abode of love and peace in Baltimore, which held his whole heart and which had become his home.

A few weeks later Mr. Allan died, leaving the whole of his fortune to his second wife and her children.

* * * * *

It now became more important than ever for Edgar Poe to earn a living.  In spite of the fact that Mr. Allan was known to have lost all regard for him, his friends had always believed that he would be remembered in the will.  They believed that John Allan’s rigid, sometimes even strained, idea of justice would cause him to provide for the boy for whom he had voluntarily, albeit against his own judgment, made himself responsible.  The fact that the boy had turned out to be, in Mr. Allan’s opinion, “trifling,” that he refused to engage in any “useful” work and that at five and twenty years of age he had not established himself in any “paying business” would, those who knew Mr. Allan best believed, be with him but another reason for ensuring against want his first wife’s spoiled darling who was evidently incapable of taking care of himself and therefore (so they believed he would argue) so much the more his care.

Possibly The Dreamer may have taken this view himself.  However that may be, the opening of the will silenced all conjecture, and as has been said, made the need of his making his work produce money more pressing than ever.  His friend Wilmer did his best for him—­publishing his stories in The Saturday Visitor from time to time and paying him as well as he was able.  But Wilmer and his paper were poor themselves. The Visitor was only a small weekly, with a modest subscription list.  It had little to pay, however good the “copy” and that little and Mother Clemm’s earnings put together barely kept the wolf from the door.