The boy’s knock brought an immediate answer. The grave-faced man servant showed his pleasure at sight of the youth.
“Your grandfather has been expecting you, Master George,” said he. “I will tell him that you have arrived.”
To be constantly forced to move under false colors was a bitter thing for Ezra. He was a lad who was frankness itself and one who detested methods that smacked of trickery. But to have all in Boston continue to believe him to be his brother George he felt was necessary if he was to aid the colonial cause. There was not a moment of his stay in Boston, during this period, or a time that he answered to his brother’s name, that his honesty and shame did not urge him to proclaim himself. But he stubbornly held this impulse in check.
“If it were a matter of my own,” he frequently told himself, “I could act as I saw fit. But this matter is not my own.”
His grandfather greeted him in his library, a stately room filled with morning sunshine, and furnished after the stiff fashion of that day. Seated at a window with a tall volume upon his knees, was a striking-looking officer, attired in the brilliant uniform of a British general.
“I would not have thought you interested in such things as this, Mr. Prentiss,” this gentleman was saying, not noticing the boy’s entrance. “It denotes rare judgment and taste in the binding. And the book itself is very rare,” with much admiration. “I know of only one other in existence.”
“The gathering of such was a folly of my son’s,” said the old man sternly.
“Folly!” The soldier laughed amusedly. “Well, that’s all to one’s taste, I suppose. But for my part, the more follies of this sort,” nodding toward a great heap of other books which he apparently had already inspected, “a man possesses, the more apt I would be to like him.”
“And he was not alone in his folly,” said the old merchant. “He left two sons, both of whom have inherited more or less of his manner of thought.” He gestured grimly toward Ezra as he added: “This is one of them.”
The general looked over his shoulder at the boy; then he arose, brushing traces of dust, left by the books, from his immaculate uniform. He was a polished man of the world, plainly a scholar and unquestionably a gentleman.