Page:Solo (1924).pdf/57

 "What have you there?" she asked, coming to meet him and reaching for the book with wet hands. She glanced at the page, pressed her lips together, snapped the covers to, and placed the volume on the table.

"Aunt Verona—" Paul commenced tentatively, and waited.

"That's a silly book, child," she said, trying to keep a harsh note out of her voice. "I'd rather you didn't read it . . . Run out and play a while before the sun goes down."

Reluctantly, Paul left the room, giving an apprehensive glance over his shoulder at the crate on the floor with its scores of books in disorderly array. His apprehension clung to him out of doors, and he sat on a chopping block by the woodshed, wondering and wondering.

A few moments later his attention was caught by the changed colour and increased volume of smoke issuing from the chimney. He ran back and peeked into the kitchen. Aunt Verona had five or six books in her apron and was stuffing pages and bindings into the stove with the poker. She was muttering to herself, so engrossed in destruction that she failed to observe the intruder.

When the last volume in her apron was disposed of, she replaced the kettle over the flames, and Paul stole away to the woodyard, frightened, outraged, and sad. Life had gone terribly off-key again, and this time it was Aunt Verona who had deliberately played a false chord in her own theme. He was sure that many precious clues had been consumed in the flames, many an enchanting tale irrevocably pressed back by Aunt Verona's drawn lips. It was small consolation that thirty or forty books had been spared. None of them, he felt, would breathe any hint of a more personal significance than ordinary books; their title-pages would be without penned inscriptions.

One volume from the crate he had brought away in