"Shall I bring you a drink?"
"No, Richard, thank you."
"Shall I take myself downstairs?"
"Yes, Richard, please."
Richard ran down the steps.
"In six hours father will be here, then let us hope that sanity will return to this demented household."
Richard read "Professor Ellenborough's Last Class" and smiled; then he read "Bitter Bread" and was filled with awe. It was English and it was prose, but it was like the old Greek stuff that he had pegged away over for so many years. It made him see for the first time sense and beauty in the old Greek stuff. Perhaps he had been up to this time very stupid. He felt, with all his good opinion of himself, that even after a second reading of "Bitter Bread" he could not understand it wholly. Humbled, he took from the long line of texts on his father's shelf a familiar and hated volume and looked into it. He had never expected to look into it again, but now as he read ideas for music came into his mind.
While he read, he held "Willard's Magazine" on his knee. It was overwhelming, ennobling, to be connected with so great a man. He longed to read the story to his mother, to make her see in it what he saw, to ask a hundred questions about Basil. He reviewed all the facts that he knew; the locked room which had been Basil's; the conviction, early impressed upon him, that it was not to be entered, was not, indeed, a place where one would wish to be.
"I hope, when I am dead, no one will treat my room that way," said Richard. To die with work undone, with life waiting! How cruel! He wondered whether Basil had known that he must die. Shivering, he went out of the cool study into the sunshine.
Dr. Lister returned, as was expected, at four o'clock. He looked white and tired. When Richard met him with the word that Mrs. Lister was not well, he went at once to her room. There, weeping, she told him about "Professor Ellenborough's Last Class." What he had to tell made her feel no better. She said that she did not wish any supper; she would stay where she was, and when he had told Richard he should come back.