A Hoosier Chronicle | Page 4

earlier years had been spent
or why or with whom she did not know; and when her grandfather was
so kind, and her studies so absorbing, it did not seem worth while to
trouble about any state of existence antedating her first clear
recollections--which were of days punctuated and governed by the
college bell, and of people who either taught or studied, with glimpses
now and then of the women and children of the professors' households.
There were times, when the winds whispered sharply round the cottage
on winter nights, or when the snow lay white on the campus and in the
woods beyond, when some memory taunted her, teasing and luring afar
off; and once, as she walked with her grandfather on a day in March,
and he pointed to a flock of wild geese moving _en échelon_ toward
the Kankakee and the far white Canadian frontier, she experienced a
similar vague thrill of consciousness, as though remembering that
elsewhere, against blue spring sky, she had watched similar migrant
battalions sweeping into the north.
She had never known a playmate. The children of the college circle
went to school in town, while she, from her sixth year, was taught
systematically by her grandfather. The faithful oversight of Mary, the
maid-of-all-work, constituted Sylvia's sole acquaintance with anything
approximating maternal care. Mary, unknown to Sylvia and Professor
Kelton, sometimes took counsel--the privilege of her long residence in
the Lane--of some of the professors' wives, who would have been glad
to help directly but for the increasing reserve that had latterly marked
Professor Kelton's intercourse with his friends and neighbors.

Sylvia was vaguely aware of the existence of social distinctions, but in
Buckeye Lane these were entirely negligible; they were, in fact, purely
academic, to be studied with other interesting phenomena by spectacled
professors in quiet laboratories. It may, however, be remarked that
Sylvia had sometimes gazed, not without a twinge, upon the daughter
of a village manufacturer whom she espied flashing through the Lane
on a black pony, and this young person symbolized all worldly
grandeur to Sylvia's adoring vision. Sylvia knew the world chiefly from
her reading,--Miss Alcott's and Mrs. Whitney's stories at first, and "St.
Nicholas" every month, on a certain day that found her meeting the
postman far across the campus; and she had read all the "Frank"
books,--the prized possessions of a neighbor's boy,--from the Maine
woods through the gunboat and prairie exploits of that delectable hero.
At fourteen she had fallen upon Scott and Bulwer and had devoured
them voraciously during the long vacation, in shady corners of the
deserted campus; and she was now fixing Dickens's characters
ineffaceably in her mind by Cruikshank's drawings. She was well
grounded in Latin and had a fair reading knowledge of French and
German. It was true of Sylvia, then and later, that poetry did not greatly
interest her, and this had been attributed to her undoubted genius for
mathematics. She was old for her age, people said, and the Lane
wondered what her grandfather meant to do with her.
The finding of Professor Kelton proves to be, as Sylvia had surmised, a
simple matter. He is at work in a quiet alcove of the college library, a
man just entering sixty, with white, close-trimmed hair and beard. The
eyes he raises to his granddaughter are like hers, and there is a further
resemblance in the dark skin. His face brightens and his eyes kindle as
he clasps Sylvia's slender, supple hand.
"It must be a student--are you sure he isn't a student?"
Sylvia was confident of it.
"Very likely an agent, then. They're very clever about disguising
themselves. I never see agents, you know, Sylvia."
Sylvia declared her belief that the stranger was not an agent, and the

professor glanced at his book reluctantly.
"Very well; I will see him. I wish you would run down these references
for me, Sylvia. Don't trouble about those I have checked off. It can't be
possible I am following a false clue. I'm sure I printed that article in the
'Popular Science Monthly,' for I recall perfectly that John Fiske wrote
me a letter about it. Come home when you have finished and we'll take
our usual walk together."
Professor Kelton had relinquished his chair in the college when Sylvia
came to live with him twelve years before the beginning of this history,
and had shut himself away from the world; but no one knew why.
Sylvia was the child of his only daughter, of whom no one ever spoke,
though the older members of the faculty had known her, as they had
known also the professor's wife, now dead many years. Professor
Kelton had changed with the coming of Sylvia, so his old associates
said; and their wives wondered that he should