Page:Daskam Bacon--Whom the gods destroy.djvu/94

 some rainy evening he would appear, lonely and hungry, eager for the praise and warmth of Anne's library, an exquisite poem in his pocket. Served to repletion by the secretly scornful butler, he would smoke a while, then draw out the sheet of foolscap, and read in his nervous yet musical voice the latest page of the book that was to bring him fame.

On one such night—it was when he brought them "Dawn on the River," the only poem of which Anne had a copy, and the one which a well-known firm afterward printed under his photograph and sold by thousands at Easter-tide—he broke through the mist—it was too impalpable to be called a wall of reserve—that held his personality apart from them, and talked wonderfully for an hour. They seemed to see the clear soul of some gentle, strayed fawn; his thoughts were like summer clouds mirrored in a placid brook. All the crowding, sweating humanity of his stunted boyhood had flowed through his youth like an ugly drain laid through a fresh mountain stream. He seemed to have lived all his years with young