"It costs me nothing but a sleepless hour now and then," I told her. "It is not paid for. But I owe Andrews four hundred dollars for it. God knows when I shall pay it. But why do you ask, Alicia?" "I have just read in _Book Prices Current_ that a copy was sold by Sotheby’s in London for one hundred pounds." "Already!" I murmured and I was lost in admiration not of the accretion in value—I am used to that—but of the girl’s facility in acquiring the interest and the jargon of my hobby. "Oh, Mr. Andrews must have a wonderful place!" she exclaimed. "That must be a splendid business. Where is he? How I’d love to see it!" "You shall some day, Alicia," I told her. "He is in Twenty-ninth Street, and an excellent fellow he is." I then explained to her how Andrews had insisted upon planting the book on my shelves. Alicia gazed at me in silence for a moment, then suddenly tears glittered in her eyes. "It’s because of us," she said, with a quivering lip, "because we came that you couldn’t buy it!" "Don’t talk rubbish, Alicia," I flared at her. "A collector gets almost as much pleasure in thinking of books he can’t get as in those he buys. Don’t you think you alone are worth more to me than an old Boswell?" "No," she murmured gloomily, "but I’m going to try to be." *BOOK TWO* *CHAPTER XII* Many months have passed since I last made an entry in this, which I mean to be a record of my life for later years, when I am grown old and white and memory gives back vividly only the days of childhood. It must be that the stoking of the furnace below all winter, or else my absorption in Visconti’s, has banished reflection upon events from out of my mind. It is not reflection that was banished, however, but only the energy to record it. The folk who work the treadmill leave few records behind them. And I am of the treadmill, occupant of an office chair, one of the gray mass of dwellers in the suburbs of life. The office of Visconti’s, that was at first like a queer old wharf in some foreign city to a ship from distant parts, has grown familiar and almost homelike, so that I feel the barnacles gathering about my hulk at the mooring place. It is ever the same. I come and I labor and I go. The chair and the desk await me of a morning and by ten o’clock it is as though I had never left them. I go forth of an afternoon into freedom and feel a momentary desire to wander about as of old. The bland frontages of New York still have a lure for me. But the nestlings for whom I am laboring are at Crestlands and to them I automatically hasten my steps. But is all that about to end? To-day, for the first time since his disappearance, I heard of poor Laura’s husband,—Pendleton. For to-day I have received an astonishing letter from Dibdin, and it is that, I suppose, which has stirred me to writing again.