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"Oh, never mind," he said when he saw that I was troubled. "Maybe it wouldn’t be much fun unless I saw them grow. I’m so glad you’re back. I like to have all my friends home at night. "

His fever ran very high at dusk, and he was much excited and half-delirious and wanted the Professor to come and tell him stories. "I want to know," he said quite distinctly, "about the white horses of Rhesus; I have forgotten who stole them. "

The Professor was not far to seek. He sat down in the shadow; the screen was before the droplight to shield Jack-a-Boy’s fever-blind eyes, and holding that hot little hand in his, the man of learning told that old, old story of Achilles’ wrath. Ordinarily the Professor’s voice is hard and didactic, like that of all men who have lectured in classrooms all their lives. But he spoke so softly that night, I thought a certain musical quality crept into it. I could never have believed him capable of the sweetness and directness with which be told that wonderful story, his phrases taking on a certain metrical cadence of their own.

"And now about Achilles shouting at the wall," urged the boy.

But before the Professor had finished with Patroclus’ death and his friend’s sorrow Jack-a-Boy was wandering again, and talking about what he wanted for Christmas, and the reindeer of Santa Claus and the white horses of Rhesus. He tossed painfully in his little brass bed, and complained that it was hard and that the sheets were burning him. The Woman Nobody Called On took him up in her fine, strong arms and he seemed to rest comfortably there. Presently he looked up and said:

"Are you very tired holding me?"

"No, dear; would you rather lie down?"

" Oh, no! Not unless you’re tired. I like to have you hold me, ’cause I can just feel you love me out of your arms," he murmured drowsily.

She held him so all night, while his mother got a little rest, until the dull, gray light of the dawn blanched the lamplight in the room, that hour so common for the passage of souls, when "the glowworm shows the matin to be near. "

Then I felt a sense of relief, and there came a change in the oppressive air of the room; it became cooler, and just a faint breeze came in at the open windows, and I seemed to detect above the odors of medicine a fresh, wet smell of violets and of autumn woods and green, mossy places by the mountain streams, and I remembered that it was the time when the spirits of the dead, that have been wandering up and down the world through the night, hurry back to spirit land. I think, as they flitted by our windows, Jack-a-Boy must have recognized some joyous spirit with whom he had played long ago in Arcady, for he left us. Perhaps some wood nymph, tall and fair, came in and laid her cool fingers on his brow and bore him off with the happy children of Pan.

The long, bad dream of the flowers and the casket and the dismal hymns, so cruelly inappropriate for such a glad and beautiful little life, and the little white hearse, and the abandoned grief of us all, is merely a blur to me now. I try to forget all that, and to remember only that Jack-a-Boy heard the pipes of Pan as the old wood gods trooped by in the gray morning, and that he could not stay.

The night after it was all over I went to the Professor’s room. He was sitting alone in the darkness, before his desk, with his head resting on his hand. The student lamp, that had burned every night for so many years and had lit the scholar’s way through so many miles of patient research, was dark. He lay so heavily back in his old reading chair that for the first time I realized that he was an old man, was growing older, and was not just old by nature, like the casts and leatherbound folios about him. I bade him good evening, but he did not lift his head.