The only thing which he had asked leave to take from his uncle’s house, was his own library. It piled Mrs. Granite’s spare chamber from the old, brown carpet to the low and dingy ceiling. Barricades of books stood on the floor by the ugly little coal-stove; and were piled upon the stained pine table at which he sat to study in a hard wood chair with a turkey-red cushion. Of the pictures, dear to his youth, and to his trained taste, but two had come through with him in the flying leap from Beacon Street to Mrs. Granite’s. Over the table in his study a fine engraving watched him. It was Guido’s great Saint Michael. Above the straw mattress in the chilly closet where he slept hung a large photograph of Leonardo’s Christ; the one from the Last Supper, as it was found in the ruined fresco on the monastery wall. But Jane Granite stood irresolute upon the bare, steep stairs, with the stone-china teacup in her hand. The minister had never concentrated his mind on Jane. He was a busy man. She was a modest, quiet girl; she helped her mother “do” his rooms, and never slammed the door when she went out. He felt a certain gratitude to her, for the two women took trouble for him far beyond the merits of the meagre sum allowed them for his bread and codfish. But for the life of him, if he had been required to, he could not have told anybody how Jane Granite looked. When her timid knock struck the panel of his door, he started impatiently, put down his pen, and patiently bade her enter. “I thought perhaps, sir--you would drink your tea?” pleaded Jane. “You haven’t eaten a morsel, and mother will mind it when she comes home.” Bayard looked at her in a dazed way; trying to see the connection between forty-cent Japan tea and that beautiful thing said of Whitefield, that he “forgot all else about the men before him, but their immortality and their misery.” “It’s getting cold,” said Jane, with quivering lip. “I stood on the stairs so long before I could make up my mind to disturb you. Let me get a hot cup, now, sir--do!” “Why, I’ll come down!” said Bayard. “I must not make myself as troublesome as this.” He pushed away his books, and followed her to the sitting-room, where, in default of a dining-room, and in vague deference to the antecedents of a guest popularly reported not to be used to eating in the kitchen, the meals of the family were served. “Maybe you’d eat the fish-hash--a mouthful, sir?” asked Jane, brightening, “and there’s the stewed prunes.”