'His mother’s dead,' the man explained.
'Little sister’s dead, too,' Stanislaus supplemented him. 'S’e token a awful bad cold so s’e couldn’t b’eave. I take awful bad colds, but I don’t die, do I?' he demanded.
'Yes,' said the man, 'my baby’s dead, too. I had a woman lookin' after both kids, but she let the baby git the pneumonia.'
'I fink I like you better van vat other lady,' Stanislaus confided to Miss Lyman.
'Of course we can take him,' Miss Lyman said hastily to Mr. Lincoln.
And thus it was that Stanislaus came to Lomax.
As has been said, he was the youngest child at school. This in itself was sufficient to set him apart from the thirty or so other blind boys; but there were other things that served to distinguish him as well. His thoughts, for instance, were so different—so unexpected and whimsical; so entirely off the beaten track.
Witness Mr. Grey, for instance. At his best Mr. Grey was a delightful person; but as he was of a retiring disposition, he never flowered into being, save in a sympathetic atmosphere. Miss Julia, for example, never met Mr. Grey. She was one of the older teachers, whose boast it was that she never stood for any foolishness. In her not doing so, however, she was apt to walk with a heavy foot over other folks' most cherished feelings. For which reason, sensitive people were inclined in her presence to retreat within themselves, sailing, as it were, with their lights blanketed. This was the reason, no doubt, why she and Mr. Grey never met.
Indeed, Mr. Grey was of such an extremely shy nature that he had to be observed with the greatest delicacy. Looked at too closely, he was apt to go out like a blown candle. He lived apparently in an empty closet in the blind boys' clothes room. It is probable that he had taken up his abode there for the sake of being near Stanislaus, for as the latter was too small to be in school all the morning, he spent the rest of his time with Miss Lyman in the clothes room, where she sat and sewed on buttons, mended rips, and put on patches, in a desperate endeavor to keep her army of blind boys mended up. When the other children were about, as they usually were on Saturdays, Mr. Grey kept discreetly to himself, and his presence in the closet would not have been suspected. On the long school mornings, however, when Miss Lyman sat quietly sewing, with Stanislaus playing about, no one could be more unbending than Mr. Grey. Stanislaus would go over to the closet and open it a crack, and then he and Mr. Grey would fall into pleasant conversation. Miss Lyman, of course, could hear only Stanislaus’s side of it, but he constantly repeated his friend’s remarks for her benefit.
From hints which Stanislaus let fall, Miss Lyman gathered that there had once been a real Mr. Grey in the past, from which beginning, the interesting personality of the closet had developed.