ing his cane over his arm and clicking down the street to
the Van Dorn home; but he felt in spite of all his daughter's efforts to
welcome him--and perhaps because of them--that he was a stranger there.
So slowly and rather imperceptibly to him, certainly without any
conscious desire for it, a fondness for Kenyon Adams sprang up in the
Doctor's heart. For it was exceedingly soft in spots and those spots
were near his home. He was domestic and he was fond of home joys. So
when Mrs. Nesbit put aside the encyclopedia, from which she was getting
the awful truth about Babylonian Art for her paper to be read before the
Shakespeare Club, and going to the piano, brought from the bottom of a
pile of yellow music a tattered sheet, played a Chopin nocturne in a
rolling and rather grand style that young women affected before the
Civil War, the Doctor's joy was scarcely less keen than the child's.
Then came rare occasions when Laura, being there for the night while her
husband was away on business, would play melodies that cut the child's
heart to the quick and brought tears of joy to his big eyes. It seemed
to him at those times as if Heaven itself were opened for him, and for
days the melodies she played would come ringing through his heart. Often
he would sit absorbed at the piano when he should have been practicing
his lesson, picking out those melodies and trying with a poignant
yearning for perfection to find their proper harmonies. But at such
times after he had frittered away a few minutes, Mrs. Nesbit would call
down to him, "You, Kenyon," and he would sigh and take up his scales and
runs and arpeggios.

Kenyon was developing into a shy, lovely child of few noises; he seemed
to love to listen to every continuous sound--a creaking gate, a
waterdrip from the eaves, a whistling wind--a humming wire. Sometimes
the Doctor would watch Kenyon long minutes, as the child listened to the
fire's low murmur in the grate, and would wonder what the little fellow
made of it all. But above everything else about the child the Doctor was
interested in watching his eyes develop into the great, liquid, soulful
orbs that marked his mother. To the Doctor the resemblance was rather
weird. But he could see no other point in the child's body or mind or
soul whereon Margaret Mueller had left a token. The Doctor liked to
discuss Kenyon with his wife from the standpoint of ancestry. He took a
sort of fiendish delight--if one may imagine a fiend with a