“I am sure I can’t understand your notions. Do you mean, you think he is less miserable than before?” said Mrs. Mancredo, looking toward Reginald, who sat reading the book from which he was inseparable, as a very little child reads. The sight of that book made her wild with nervousness. There seemed something uncanny in the way he had identified himself with the personages and ideas there. And his numerous polyglot questions asked in regard to things she could not explain, and his weird, childlike shrewdness of imagination as to some unseen world of mind and spirit, were getting to be the horrible thing to Mrs. Mancredo. From what in the apparently stolid, noncommittal old Reginald, this spirit of occult divination of the purposes, powers and results of Petrarch’s struggles, had evolved itself, she could not fancy. And she was getting so nervous at the steady illumination of his eyes that she would have given half she was worth to have removed from her memory all knowledge of his existence. Whether he had become absolutely foolish, or uncannily wise and weird, she did not know. But her refuge was Ethelbert; and Reginald’s unaltered fancy for calling Ethelbert “mother,” seemed to favor Mrs. Mancredo’s dawning hope of a way to get rid of him helpfully. And as she so thinking stood there, down in the garden, looking back at him up on the piazza, he called out: “Mother! mother!” and they both walked quickly to him. “Let’s have a nice read about ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ and about the poor boy out of whom the devils were cast. I want to know about those mighty works, and how power did them.” Mrs. Mancredo, with an ignorant person’s horror of what may result from irregularity of mental action, felt it was awful that a man who had lost the gustatory appetites which render nice food a pleasure to the palate, should yet, as Ethelbert said, feast on the high thoughts and things of the unseen realms. For Ethelbert believed he did not _think_ in the sense of concentrating attention; but, instead, she believed his mind simply reflected back to his attention what passed in the realms of life above and anear him, as a lake reflects all that shadows itself upon its surface; and this she explained to Mrs. Mancredo, adding: “It is for this reason that I wish he could be always cared for by some discerning person, who, dwelling unmoved in that beautiful realm which now has hold on his mind, and who, reading his very thought, would thus sustain him at peace there, as a student under these angelic teachers, and so educate him for a real manhood which he would thus yet attain. Do you understand?” “No, I don’t understand,” was the blunt response. “All I know is, he has played out his little play on the stage of life, and has made a tragedy or farce of it, common enough in this age. He makes me wild with nervousness sometimes. What do you want me to _do_ with him, for heaven’s sake?”