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up. He began some Greek yesterday,” he added, a little guiltily.

“Greek? Oh, Winthrop! Well, I’m glad, for now I know you’ll never be content to let him go till you’ve taught him all you know. It will make up to you, too, for my having been so stupid about it.”

“A poor Kitten!” The Professor laughed and kissed her, his attempts to interest her in the language which absorbed him having been singularly fruitless.

Tony meanwhile, upstairs alone in the little room which was now called his, with several volumes of Shakespeare strewn on top of him and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall propped up on the reading-stand, forgot to read while he tried to recall his outpourings of the afternoon.

“I don’t know what was wrong with me to-day, I chattered so to that woman.” (Poor Alison!) “I don’t think I ever told anybody so much before. She gets it out of you. . . . Does she really like me a little, or is she only sorry because I’m ill? Oh, I wish I owned someone who had to like me! . . . She has a ripping smile.”

Gibbon was neglected for the rest of that evening, and Tony lay and stared at the ceiling till the Professor came for his nightly chat.

Nearly two months of life in the room he seemed always to have known, with its bookshelf where lived all the books which had become his friends, except for the half-dozen which lay within reach of his hand; with its pictures brought from somewhere downstairs and hung so that his eyes had something good to rest on wherever they turned—good prints of Rembrandt’s “Man in Armour,” Meissonier’s “Cavalier,” a Velasquez or two—nearly two months, whose evenings brought the Professor, his half-hour lengthening to an hour before every question had been asked and answered—whose days brought Alison, her fleeting visits