Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was wrong. His school work was the merest pretence; he had other concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over old burial records downtown or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study, where the startlingly⁠—one almost fancied increasingly⁠—similar features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall.