ingly old-fashioned clothes, installed him before the kitchen stove with a book and an apple, and stolen out for an hour or two.
He had suffered mental agony during her absences, for he had guessed that she had been at the doctor's and the association of the ideas of doctor and night-time awakened in his mind a tragic memory. He saw himself again as a boy of three in Aunt Verona's arms wriggling, imploring his mother not to go away. He saw his mother run back into the room, kneel to kiss him, the tears streaming down her cheeks, then wrench herself away, heedless of his din, to go to a fiendish place she called the "sanatorium." At that point the picture became blurred, for she had never come back.
The terror bred in him by that dim tragedy had come stealing back like a ghost on the few occasions when Aunt Verona had gone out, steadfastly refusing to let him accompany her. He would rather have faced a legion of doctors with her than be left at the mercy of weird shadows, but nothing would have induced him to say "Yes" when Aunt Verona enjoined, in parting, "You won't be afraid, child, will you?" Ashamed of his fears, he sat with his book until the outer door closed, then retreated to a corner of the room, pressed his back against the protective wall and waited, tense and wide-eyed.
He wondered, too, why he should have to go on to Miss Todd's for choir rehearsal, when the choir might much more conveniently have come to Aunt Verona's. Miss Todd had only a tinny upright piano and her house was on the hill beyond the church, whereas Aunt Verona had a concert piano that had been brought on his father's ship all the way from Hamburg in Germany, the best piano in the whole province, and the harmonium which had belonged to his mother was almost as good as a pipe organ. Yet it was somehow unthinkable that the choir should come to Aunt Verona's house. For that matter
