CHAPTER I
Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at
the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a
man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as
a student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of
Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to
take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still,
contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn
paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked trees on
which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the river at the foot
of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright as
because he found it so pleasant. The few passers-by glanced at him
unconcernedly, and even the children who hurried along with their schoolbags
under their arms seemed to find it perfectly natural that a tall brown
gentleman should be standing there, looking up through his glasses at the
gray housetops.
The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs
and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down
the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow. His
nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood smoke in
the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness that
came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles Street between
jangling street cars and shelving lumber drays, and after a moment of
uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The street was quiet, deserted,
and hung with a thin bluish haze