Part 3 (1/2)

Then his eye fell upon it--the music roll that had slipped quietly to the floor when her eager hand had lifted itself to touch the b.u.t.terfly, opening and closing his great wings in the fig-box. He crossed to it and lifted it almost reverently, brus.h.i.+ng a breath of dust from its leather sides.... He bent closer to it, staring at a little silver plate that swung from the strap. He carried it to the window, rubbing it on the worn black sleeve, and bending closer, studying the deep-cut letters.

Then he lifted his head. A quick sigh floated from him. Miss Elizabeth Harris, 108 Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive. He knew the place quite well--facing the lake, where the water boomed against the great break-water. He would take it to her--to-morrow--the next day--next week, perhaps.... He wrapped it carefully away and laid it in a drawer to wait. She had asked him to come.

V

THE GREEK PROFESSOR LAUGHS

To Mrs. Philip Harris, in the big house looking out across the lake, the pa.s.sing days brought grateful rea.s.surance.... Betty was safe--Miss Stone was well again--and the man had not come.... She breathed more freely as she thought of it. The child had told her that she had asked him.

But she had forgotten to give him her address; and it would not do to be mixed up with a person like that--free to come and go as he liked.

He was no doubt a worthy man. But Betty was only a child, and too easily enamoured of people she liked. It was strange how deep an impression the man's words had made on her. Athens and Greece filled her waking moments. Statues and temples--photographs and books of travel loaded the school-room shelves. The house reeked with Greek learning. Poor Miss Stone found herself drifting into archaeology; and an exhaustive study of Greek literature, Greek life, Greek art filled her days. The theory of Betty Harris's education had been elaborately worked out by specialists from earliest babyhood. Certain studies, rigidly prescribed, were to be followed whether she liked them or not--but outside these lines, subjects were to be taken up when she showed an interest in them.

There could be no question that the time for the study of Greek history and Greek civilisation had come. Miss Stone laboured early and late. Instruction from the university down the lake was pressed into service.... But out of it all the child seemed, by some kind of precious alchemy, to extract only the best, the vital heart of it.

The instructor in Greek marvelled a little. ”She is only a child,” he reported to the head of the department, ”and the family are American of the newest type--you know, the Philip Harrises?”

The professor nodded. ”I know--hide and hoof a generation back.”

The instructor a.s.sented. ”But the child is uncanny. She knows more about Greek than--”

”Than _I_ do, I suppose.” The professor smiled indulgently. ”She wouldn't have to know much for that.”

”It isn't so much what she _knows_. She has a kind of _feeling_ for things. I took up a lot of photographs to-day--some of the _later_ period mixed in--and she picked them out as if she had been brought up in Athens.”

The professor looked interested. ”Modern educational methods?”

”As much as you like,” said the instructor. ”But it is something more.

When I am with the child I am in Athens itself. Chicago makes me blink when I come out.”

The professor laughed. The next day he made an appointment to go himself to see the child. He was a famous epigraphist and an authority in his subject. He had spent years in Greece--with his nose, for the most part, held close to bits of parchment and stone.

When he came away, he was laughing softly. ”I am going over for a year,”

he said, when he met the instructor that afternoon in the corridor.

”Did you see the little Harris girl?” asked the instructor.

The professor paused. ”Yes, I saw her.”

”How did she strike you?”

”She struck me dumb,” said the professor. ”I listened for the best part of an hour while she expounded things to me--asked me questions I couldn't answer, mostly.” He chuckled a little. ”I felt like a fool,” he added, frankly, ”and it felt good.”

The instructor smiled. ”I go through it twice a week. The trouble seems to be that she's alive, and that she thinks everything Greek is alive, too.”

The professor nodded. ”It's never occurred to her it's dead and done with, these thousand years and more.” He gave a little sigh. ”Sometimes I've wondered myself whether it is--quite as dead as it looks to you and me,” he added. ”You know that grain--wheat or something--that Blackman took from the Egyptian mummy he brought over last spring--”

”Yes, he planted it--”

”Exactly. And all summer he was tending a little patch of something green up there in his back yard--as fresh as the eyes of Pharaoh's daughter ever looked on--”