my mother died. I came back to the little bow-windowed house and lived with my father. I was quite alone in the world." In spite of myself I had a little movement of impatience. "How self-centred the man is! As though his case were at all peculiar! Wants shaking up and knocking about." He seemed to know my thought. "You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read--I used to sit in the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I'd walk in the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, wonder about people and I grew more and more frightened of talking, of meeting people, of little local dinner-parties. It was as though I were on one side of the river and they were all on the other. I would think sometimes how splendid it would be if I could cross--but I couldn't cross. Every year it became more impossible!" "You wanted some one to take you out of yourself," I said, and then shuddered at my own banality. But he took me very seriously. "I did. Of course," he answered. "But who would bother? They all thought me impossible. The girls all laughed at me--my own cousins. Sometimes people tried to help me. They never went far enough. They gave me up too soon." "He evidently thinks he was worth a lot of trouble," I thought irritably. But suddenly he laughed. "That same doctor one day spoke of me, not knowing that I was near him; or perhaps he knew and thought it would be good for me. 'Oh, Trenchard,' he said. 'He ought to be in a nunnery ... and he'd be quite safe, too. _He'd_ never cause a scandal!' They thought of me as something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he died, he said: 'I'd like to have had a son!' He never noticed me at his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him." "Well," I said at last to break a long pause that followed his last words, "what did you think about all that time you were alone?"