And yet there was always fear in my friendship. He was queer like his sister before him. Her death seemed to have unbalanced his reason; it was a weakness that grew upon him. He seemed to have lost his power of distinguishing between the present and the imaginary or the past. Often in the cottage he would forget that his sister was not still alive and, rising from the table, would look beyond me as if he saw her, or would go out into the passage and call to her. Nothing in the cottage had been changed since her departure. Her belongings lay untouched, just where she had left them, as though her return was hourly expected. He fell into the way of imitating her gestures, and humming snatches of her crazy songs. He would tumble over the precipice into the abyss of insanity without warning, in the middle of being rational; and would clamber back just as suddenly, apparently without knowledge of where he had gone. Of one of her songs he was extremely fond. I had often heard Lady Zion sing it as she rode between the hedges, and had been made aware of her approach long before I caught sight of her:-- “All the chimneys in our town Wake from death when the cold comes down; Through the summer against the sky Tall, and silent, and stark they lie-- But every chimney in our town Starts to breathe when the cold comes down.” Some safe-guarding astuteness prevented him from showing his weakness at the Red House; and I was too fond of him to tell. To the rest of the boys he was only the grubby, somewhat eccentric little “stinks” master. Nevertheless, sane or insane, it was through the Creature’s efforts that, after a year of coaching, I won a history scholarship at Lazarus for eighty pounds. Still, eighty pounds would not carry me to Oxford. It became a worrying problem to my family exactly what my grandfather, if he were my benefactor, had meant by “undertaking the expenses of my education.” His generosity might be co-terminous with my school-days. A month after the winning of the scholarship the lawyers wrote, setting our minds at rest and congratulating me on my success in the name of their client. This letter was gratifying in more than a monetary sense--it was a sign that the anonymous friend was keeping a close watch on my doings. Since the interview at Chelsea there had been no intercourse between my father and Uncle Obad. I had once contrived to see my uncle by stealth, but the first question he had asked me was, did I come with my father’s knowledge. When I could not give him that assurance, he had sorrowfully refused to have anything to do with me. At the time I shrank from mentioning the matter to my father; so for a year and a half my uncle and his doings had dropped completely out of my life.