At last as he sat gloomily killing time trying to whittle a wooden chain, and making a botch of it, he seemed to remember one rainy day when he was a little boy, wandering into a room with another book-case in it. Not being a little girl, he had had small interest in exploring the inside of the house, and where that room was he had forgotten; but if there had been any books in it, they were there still; no single decade ever made any change in that house. It was worth having a look. Anybody but a Crittenden, dealing with Crittendens, would have gone to Grandfather or Grandmother and asked where that book-case was. But it did not occur to Neale to do that, and if he had thought of the possibility, he would never have done it. That would have meant talk about his wanting to read, about what books he liked, and why he liked them ... all sorts of talk from which Neale shrank away as he did from physical pawing-over. He set off silently, with a casual air, upon his search, looking first into the darkened best-room, and going from that to the garret, the attic over the ell, and the woodshed loft. There were scattered books in all these places; in the best-room a few big, illustrated, show-off books, with gold on the bindings, like the Dore Bible he had so often looked at, and the big Pilgrim's Progress that he had opened only once. In the garret were dusty old school-books of past generations, and in the attic over the ell, piles of well-bound black books, with gold lettering, which turned out to be, desolatingly, nothing but by-gone Congressional Records and Census Reports. But he had not found the little brown book-case which he dimly remembered. Perhaps it wasn't here at all. Well, he'd try the chambers, mostly vacant now, which had been so full in the days Grandfather liked to tell about, when he was a little boy, one of fourteen children all growing up tumultuously together in this big old house. Neale went down the attic stairs and began to open doors. Nothing doing. Everywhere the same sparsely furnished room, with painted floor, braided mat, dark old bed and battered dresser, and ladder-back, flag-bottomed chairs. Their vacancy struck cold even on Neale's not very impressionable mind. "A room that hadn't been lived in for a long time was the limit, anyhow," he thought. But at the other end of the hall from his own low-ceilinged, little boy's room, he found one like it, rather more cheerful. The sun came in through a dormer window as it did in his own room. He remembered now that this was the room Father had always had, till he went away to college and after that to New York to live. And there, sure enough was the little book-case. Of course. He must have seen it lots of times, going by when the door was open. Now, what was in it? Maybe, after all, nothing to his purpose; probably this had been used like the shelves in the attic as a place to put volumes that nobody wanted to read.