“Now, now!” she said. “You'll feel better to-morrow.”
“What do you mean by that?” he demanded, breathing deeply.
For reply she only shook her head in an odd little way, and in her parting look at him there was something at once compassionate, amused, and reassuring.
“You'll be all right, Willie,” she said, softly, and closed the door.
Alone, William lifted clenched hands in a series of tumultuous gestures at the ceiling; then he moaned and sank into a chair at his writing-table. Presently a comparative calm was restored to him, and with reverent fingers he took from a drawer a one-pound box of candy, covered with white tissue-paper, girdled with blue ribbon. He set the box gently beside him upon the table; then from beneath a large, green blotter drew forth some scribbled sheets. These he placed before him, and, taking infinite pains with his handwriting, slowly copied:
DEAR LOLA—I presume when you are reading these lines it will be this afternoon and you will be on the train moving rapidly away from this old place here farther and farther from it all. As I sit here at my old desk and look back upon it all while I am writing this farewell letter I hope when you are reading it you also will look back upon it all and think of one you called (Alias) Little Boy Baxter. As I sit here this morning that you are going away at last I look back and I cannot rember any summer in my whole life which has been like this summer, because a great change has come over me this summer. If you would like to know what this means it was something like I said when John Watson got there yesterday afternoon and interrupted what I said. May you enjoy this candy and think of the giver. I will put something in with this letter. It is something maybe you would like to have and in exchange I would give all I possess for one of you if you would send it to me when you get home. Please do this for now my heart is braking. Yours sincerely, WILLIAM S. BAXTER (ALIAS) LITTLE BOY BAXTER.
William opened the box of candy and placed the letter upon the top layer of chocolates. Upon the letter he placed a small photograph (wrapped in tissue-paper) of himself. Then, with a pair of scissors, he trimmed an oblong of white cardboard to fit into the box. Upon this piece of cardboard he laboriously wrote, copying from a tortured, inky sheet before him:
IN DREAM
BY WILLIAM S. BAXTER
The sunset light
Fades into night
But never will I forget
The smile that haunts me yet
Through the future four long years
I hope you will remember with tears
Whate'er my rank or station
Whilst receiving my education
Though far away you seem
I will see thee in dream.
He placed his poem between the photograph and the letter, closed the box, and tied the tissue-paper about it again with the blue ribbon. Throughout these rites (they were rites both in spirit and in manner) he was subject to little catchings of the breath, half gulp, half sigh. But the dolorous tokens passed, and he sat with elbows upon the table, his chin upon his hands, reverie in his eyes. Tragedy had given way to gentler pathos;—beyond question, something had measurably soothed him. Possibly, even in this hour preceding the hour of parting, he knew a little of that proud amazement which any poet is entitled to feel over each new lyric miracle just wrought.
Perhaps he was helped, too, by wondering what Miss Pratt would think of him when she read “In Dream,” on the train that afternoon. For reasons purely intuitive, and decidedly without foundation in fact, he was satisfied that no rival farewell poem would be offered her, and so it may be that he thought “In Dream” might show her at last, in one blaze of light, what her eyes had sometimes fleetingly intimated she did perceive in part—the difference between William and such every-day, rather well-meaning, fairly good-hearted people as Joe Bullitt, Wallace Banks, Johnnie Watson, and others. Yes, when she came to read “In Dream,” and to “look back upon it all,” she would surely know—at last!