ears all his life if that were done; and yet
it had hurt him a little to gather from Baumgartner that so far there was
nothing in the papers to say he had so much as disappeared. That fact
must have been known since Thursday or Friday. Once it did cross his mind
that to keep it from his mother they would have to keep it out of the
papers. Well, as long as she did not know!

He pictured the blinds down in her room; it was the hour of her afternoon
rest. If he were at home, he would be going about quietly. Lettice would
be reading or writing in the morning-room, most probably. Father would be
gloating over his rhododendrons with a strong cigar; in his last letter
the boy had heard how beautiful they were. Horace might be with him,
smoking a cigarette, if he and Fred were not playing tennis. Their pocket
edition had not to look very far ahead to see himself smoking proper
cigarettes with the others, to hear his own voice telling them of his own
experience--of this very hour at Dr. Baumgartner's. Even Fred and Horace
would have to listen to that! Pocket looked at the long lean figure in
the chair, at the eyelids never quite closed, and so imparting at once a
softening and a sinister effect. He noted the drooping geranium in his
buttonhole, and grey ash from the Turk's head sprinkling the black alpaca
coat. It brought the very phrases of a graphic portrait almost to his
lips.

Yet if anybody had told the boy he was beginning to gloat over the silver
lining to the cloud that he was under, and that it was not silver at all
but one of the baser metals of the human heart, how indignantly he would
have denied it at first, how humbly seen it in the end!

When Phillida went off to make the tea her uncle sought his room and
sponge, but did not neglect to take Pocket with him. Pocket was for going
higher up to his own room; but Baumgartner said that would only make more
work, in a tone precluding argument. It struck Pocket that the doctor
really needed sleep, and was irritable after a continuous struggle against
it. If so, it served him right for not trusting a fellow--and for putting
Boismont in the waste-paper basket, by Jove!

There was no mistaking the red book there; it was one of the first things
Pocket noticed, while the doctor was stooping over his basin in the
opposite corner; and the schoolboy's strongest point, be it remembered,
was a stubborn tenacity of his own devices. He made a dive at the
waste-paper