s number in her memory, then restored them to their places. Now she
said:

"I have been doing something while you have been gone, Archy. Do you
think you can find out what it was?"

The boy went to the bookcase and got out the books that had been
touched, and opened them at the pages which had been stroked.

The mother took him in her lap, and said,

"I will answer your question now, dear. I have found out that in one way
you are quite different from other people. You can see in the dark,
you can smell what other people cannot, you have the talents of a
bloodhound. They are good and valuable things to have, but you must keep
the matter a secret. If people found it out, they would speak of you
as an odd child, a strange child, and children would be disagreeable to
you, and give you nicknames. In this world one must be like everybody
else if he doesn't want to provoke scorn or envy or jealousy. It is a
great and fine distinction which has been born to you, and I am glad;
but you will keep it a secret, for mamma's sake, won't you?"

The child promised, without understanding.

All the rest of the day the mother's brain was busy with excited
thinkings; with plans, projects, schemes, each and all of them uncanny,
grim, and dark. Yet they lit up her face; lit it with a fell light
of their own; lit it with vague fires of hell. She was in a fever of
unrest; she could not sit, stand, read, sew; there was no relief for
her but in movement. She tested her boy's gift in twenty ways, and kept
saying to herself all the time, with her mind in the past: "He broke my
father's heart, and night and day all these years I have tried, and all
in vain, to think out a way to break his. I have found it now--I have
found it now."

When night fell, the demon of unrest still possessed her. She went on
with her tests; with a candle she traversed the house from garret to
cellar, hiding pins, needles, thimbles, spools, under pillows, under
carpets, in cracks in the walls, under the coal in the bin; then sent
the little fellow in the dark to find them; which he did, and was happy
and proud when she praised him and smothered him with caresses.

From this time forward life took on a new complexion for her. She said,
"The future is secure--I can wait, and enjoy the waiting." The most
of her lost interests revived. She took up music again, and languages,
drawing, painting, and the other long-discarded delights of her
maidenhood. She was happy once