Harvard episodes

For a moment this document conveyed but little to John. He was obliged to read it a second time, and even then he stared appealingly at the messenger, who had turned and was eyeing him with feeble interest.

“They got pinched, didn’t they?” said the man, sadly.

“But what did he do? What’s happened?” John demanded. He was dazed; nothing he had ever seen or done in his life had prepared him for this.

“Why, they got run in,” explained the man.

“Here—you wait for me here.” The only thing John could think of just then was Haydock. “Or no—come into my room;” he unlocked the door and turned up the gas. “Be sure to wait,” he commanded, as he rushed out.

Claverly was locked for the night; John remembered this after rattling in vain at the three doors. Then he called under Haydock’s window. The senior answered from the square of yellow light above. He was on the point of going out anyhow, he said, and would join John below.

“Billy’s arrested! he’s in jail! What’ll I do?” John gasped breathlessly. He thrust the note at Haydock. “Read it.”

Haydock struck a match in the shelter of a bay window and read.

“Why, the only thing to do is to bail him out,” he laughed. “It’s horrid, not to say disgusting, to have to stay all night in a jail. How much money have you?”

“I don’t know, five dollars, I think,” answered John. The darkness covered his astonishment at Haydock’s calmness under the circumstances.

“I have thirty or forty myself, and I’ll evolve the rest somewhere.”

“Do you think you can?” To John the idea was incredible.

“Oh, heavens yes! That’s the trouble with Cambridge; you can always borrow any amount at any hour. It makes every place else seem sordid and worldly. Is the ‘guide’ in your room? I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.” He strolled away whistling. John hurried back to Matthews faster than before.

For ever so long that night was a hideous memory to Billy’s room-mate. He and Haydock and the man—a sad, silent person whom Haydock courteously tried to engage in conversation from time to time—spent hours in chilly suburban street-cars and bleak waiting stations. Haydock ignored the topic that to John was of such overwhelming and painful interest; it was as if he had disposed of the entire subject earlier in the evening when he had uttered his prophecy: “Because he’ll get kicked out.” Grey January dawn streaked the sky when the trio, after finding Billy and Dilford Bancroft chatting pleasantly with the watchmen in the police station, managed to rout up the gentleman whose function it seemed to be to determine the amount of a criminal’s bail,—he lived several miles away,—get a cab, and jog back to Cambridge. Billy talked most of the way, in spite of the silence with which John received his reflections, and Haydock’s polite but unenthusiastic attention. Dilford covered his head with the lap-robe at intervals, and had hysterics; but no one noticed him at all, except Billy, who occasionally joined him in these complex emotions.

“It was the surprise—the awful surprise of it that killed me dead,” Billy would giggle. “I was on the box-seat driving, you know,—lickety-split, to beat the band, with Harry Hollis beside me,—he fell off when we went over the car tracks. I’d like to know if he was hurt; anyhow, the car didn’t run over him, because I looked back and it never stopped. Had Jimmy fallen out then?” he appealed to Dilford, whose reply was smothered at its birth. “Then we raced the car until the horses—oh, they were corkers!—began to run away. I couldn’t hold them. I tried, upon my soul, I tried! but I was laughing so that my wrists were all sort of tickly on the inside,—you know how they do,—and I couldn’t close my fingers very tight over the reins; they just flapped around in the breeze any old way. So when the policeman ran out and yelled and waved, what on earth could I do? What could I do? We simply crashed past him like a chariot race. I looked back again and couldn’t even see the creature—only Dilly on the floor, white as a sheet, holding on with everything he had. Oh, it was terrible! perfectly terrible! I was glad we’d ditched the policeman, though; only we didn’t! That was the surprise. My dear, what do you suppose that man—that devil—did? He telephoned—telephoned—to the next police station, and when we got there they received us. Policemen? There were platoons of them,—as far as the eye could reach in every direction. And they had fish-nets and lassoes and the most fearful-looking clubs; and one of the horses fell down, and everybody sat on the poor thing’s head,—people always rush and do that when a horse falls down. I wonder why?”

No one ventured a theory, and William continued:—

“Well, they took us inside, and asked the most intimate impertinent kind of questions. I gave my own name, but Dilly didn’t; he had one all ready that went with the initials on his underclothes, so it wouldn’t be a give-away even if they had the nerve to go too far. What was it, Dilly? I’ve forgotten. He asked me what my occupation was, and I didn’t exactly like to tell him I was a student.”

“Of course not,” assented Haydock, drily.

“So I merely said ‘rentier.’”

Haydock groaned softly in his corner.

“He just looked at me,—the great big thing! I don’t think he’d ever been abroad. Oh, and before I forget it, we have to be in court at nine o’clock. Now don’t go and oversleep yourself, John, the way you do sometimes; because I must get up whether I want to or not, I suppose. Where was I? Oh, yes; after he’d asked all the questions he could think of, I wrote the note, and we waited a deuce of a while. But it wasn’t so bad after that, after the ice was broken. Then you both came—I was so relieved—and here we are ‘just off the yacht!’”

Billy thought it hardly worth while to go to bed when the cab at length reached the Square. He would have preferred to utilise the short time that remained before nine o’clock in talking over his little jaunt with Dilford. He wanted to “shake” John and Haydock, and spend a pleasant hour or two at Mr. Vosler’s hotel in town, before meeting his judge. But the plan wasn’t one that he could innocently suggest; and as the senior stayed with them until they said good-night to him at the entry of Matthews, he couldn’t very well leave John without a word, as he would have done, had they been alone. Billy tumbled into bed as soon as he got upstairs, and giggled himself to sleep, after calling into John’s room,—

“You did see the sunrise, didn’t you, old man?”

John lay awake until it was time to rouse Billy for his trial. At nine that morning the two criminals rolled up to the court-room, smoking cigarettes on the back seat of a victoria. They pleaded guilty to something,—neither of them quite knew what,—listened with downcast eyes to a bit of fatherly sarcasm, and drove away again—forty dollars poorer than when they arrived. That was in January.

The midyear examinations have an unpleasant habit of disturbing the even academic tenor early in February, as their name suggests. They announce themselves, in various prominent places, at first, like clouds no bigger than a man’s hand. The wary and the wise repair to their caves, and remain there, off and on, for days and days and days. When they finally emerge, care-worn but preserved after the deluge, they find that many loved ones are missing. John was among the first to retire to high and inaccessible altitudes. He pinned the “Crimson’s” supplementary schedule of examinations and dates to his door. After deliberating long as to where a similar reminder would most often meet the eyes of his room-mate, he carefully marked the impending tortures with ominous crosses and tacked the list to the frame of Billy’s mirror. He might with just as much effect—to say nothing of the economy of anguish—have thrown the thing into the fire.

“What the devil does this fly-paper think it’s doing on my looking-glass?” Billy had remarked on finding the evidence of John’s thoughtfulness. “Do you realise that you have utterly obliterated Sarah Bernhardt and Della Fox? I think you must be crazy.” He ripped off the paper, and let it flutter to the floor. John’s patience was inexhaustible, but his ingenuity had well defined limits; he was aware, with something like panic, that he had reached them. For weeks, he had exercised what art he had at command, in trying to seduce Billy into opening a book. He had learned that a declaration of his personal ideas in regard to the examinations—or any work he undertook—was worse than ineffectual as far as his room-mate went. It not only failed to quicken in Billy the sense—prevalent at the midyears—of approaching catastrophe, but drove him away to somebody else’s room, or perhaps to town. So, much to his own distaste, John had essayed the rôle of the serio-comic. He made a pretence—with reservations—of adopting Billy’s point of view; the reservations were meant to bring about the desired end. He would chat with Billy of the more serious aspects of college—the courses and instructors and examinations—in an attempt at something like the same breezy tone in which the boy himself touched on these subjects. When Billy, for instance, would sit up in bed in the morning and yawn and shrug and announce that he simply couldn’t go all the way over to Sever Hall to sit through Professor So-and-so’s lecture—that the man was ninety-five years old if he was a day, and slobbered, John would laugh and say,—

“Yes, isn’t he deadly? I hardly ever listen to him. Lots of people live too long. But I suppose we must go and endure it; we’re in the course, and we’ll have to worry through it somehow.”

At first Billy was rather shocked. The abrupt change of manner was so hopelessly out of character; he wouldn’t have been more astounded had he heard unseemly levity issuing from the pulpit at S. Timothy’s. But he divined almost at once—who wouldn’t have?—that John’s responsibility for other people’s affairs, though exhibited in a fashion positively weird, did not diminish; and Billy frequented 86 Matthews less than ever. John knew that he himself didn’t possess the qualities that make a man an inspiration, but he had been brought up at home and at school to believe that he was something of an influence; that he was “just the sort of man a fellow like Billy needs.” Apart from the genuine sorrow he would feel at what the official college gracefully terms the “separation” of Billy from the University, it was disconcerting to John to find out that as a kindly light he had proved uncommonly dim. In despair and disappointment, he impressed Haydock into the labour of salvation.

Haydock was very amiable about the whole affair. He had, whenever he was with Billy, the half amused affection an older fellow often feels for anything so young and pretty and inconsequent. He liked the boy’s mother too, although the lady’s guilelessness had always been a bar to conversation of other than a purely theoretical value. So, in response to John’s eleventh-hour prayers, he did what he could in spite of more immediate interests. He picked his way, one evening, through the darkness and the mud, and among the disabled butcher-waggons, by the black alley that leads to the Polo Club,—once upon a time he too had belonged to that genial institution,—and beguiled Billy and Dilford Bancroft to his room. He gave them beer, and things to smoke, and then wondered how, with two such elusive, mercurial creatures flitting about, he could ever begin to “talk shop.” Strangely enough Billy himself provided the opportunity.

“Play something, Dilly,” he said, opening Haydock’s piano. Haydock glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, but it was not yet nine; the proctor couldn’t object, no matter how excruciating Dilly’s performance might be.

“Dilly, you know, can bang the box in a way that would make you throw stones at your grandmother,” explained Billy.

“I’m extremely fond of my grandmother,” suggested Haydock.

“What do you want?” asked Dilly, seating himself.

“What do you know?”

“Oh, any old thing.”

Haydock was on the point of discreetly asking for a Sousa march, when Dilford plunged abruptly into the middle of a sonata, and played it through with astonishing brilliancy.

“I do play well, don’t I?” he admitted, when he had finished. “It always surprises me; just think what I could do if I really studied—hard, I mean,” he added lightly.

“Good heavens! man,” exclaimed Haydock, “aren’t you going to take highest honours in music? Why, you can do anything!” Haydock considered his own little thumpings important only in so far as they enabled him to understand a talent like Bancroft’s.

“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Dilford, with indifference. “My father wants me to go to work; I don’t suppose I’ll be here long.”

“Won’t you, really? I knew that Billy wasn’t going to stay; but I had an idea you would.” Haydock alluded to Billy’s probable departure with the emotion he would have displayed had he been predicting a change in the weather.

Billy pricked up his ears and his eyebrows at once. “What makes you say that?” he demanded quickly. Even Dilford dropped his customary listlessness, and looked interested.

“Why—I thought it was more or less settled.” The senior turned from one to the other in slow surprise, “If I’ve said anything I ought not to have—given things away, I mean—I’m awfully sorry. But perhaps they were mistaken.” Billy’s face, across which flitted a shade of anxiety, told him that he was perfectly safe in making a “bluff” at changing the subject.

“No, no!” Billy jerked out, impatiently; “go on! who are you talking about? You’ve heard something important,” something that didn’t emanate from John, he was thinking. “What did they say? I insist on knowing.”

“It really wasn’t much; merely that one or two of the instructors—I know some of the younger ones rather well—seemed to think that you wouldn’t—that in fact you couldn’t be with us after the midyears. That’s all. I thought you knew.”

“You’re bitched all right, all right,” laughed Bancroft.

“They said that, did they?” Billy let fall these words portentously; it was as if he were on the point of framing a great resolution.

“That’s precisely what they said.”

“Well, then—by heaven! I’ll fool them.” He really meant it.

“Oh, I wish you would! It would be easy after all. There’s time yet. I’ll help you with your English—both courses—and your Latin. You’re all right in French, of course, and the History won’t be so terrible. Is it a go?” Haydock held out his hand.

“I’ll fool them,” repeated Billy, solemnly. He gravely let his long, brown fingers rest in Haydock’s palm. And Haydock had one of those moments of quiet exultation that are the perquisites of the intelligent.

The next morning Billy and Dilly disappeared from Cambridge, and were neither seen nor heard of for five days. On the afternoon of the fourth day John, looking positively thin, turned up in Haydock’s room.

“Get up a search party and explore darkest Boston,” advised the senior, drumming on the desk with his pencil.

“Oh, I did!” John’s tone was without hope. “Harry Hollis and Jimmy Fenton took me all over—to the most awful hotels and places. They seemed to know Billy at all of them; but he wasn’t there. I never had such a night. I don’t know what to do.”

“How much money did he have?” Haydock continued to drum thoughtfully.

“Twenty dollars. I’m sure, because we both put our allowances in the bank that morning. Billy kept twenty.”

Now Haydock, who had met a great number of Billys and Dillys in his short life, knew that this particular Billy was not living anywhere on the modest sum of five dollars a day. So, after a little more drumming, he said,—

“Run over to the Charles River Bank, and ask them in just what metropolis of the United States or Europe, William is signing cheques at the present moment.”

When John returned, breathless, a few minutes later, he threw himself into a chair, and groaned,—

“They’re in Providence.”

Haydock gave up a dinner at his club that night, and a dance in town. He went, instead, to Providence. Late the next evening he deposited Billy—too much of a wreck to be either resentful or flippant—in 86 Matthews. The next day the Office put Billy “on probation.”

And the midyears were coming.

One night, after the examination period was well under way, Haydock went up to his room to study. Although the month was February, the night was heavy and depressing. The senior had much to accomplish before morning. He was nervous—almost irritable. His curtains floated like ghostly, beckoning sleeves in and out of the open windows, until he jumped up and tied them viciously into hard knots. His student lamp radiated the heat of hell and the unnumbered suns; he found himself waiting, in nervous suspense, for the periodic bubbling of its rudimentary bowels. The sound diverted his attention from his book, and wasted the limited time left him in which to commit to memory several hundred lines of Paradise Lost. The verse,—

—he came across it in the feverish scramble of learning five lines a minute by the watch,—suddenly put the situation in a light in which he had not until then been able to see it. He leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud. And as he laughed, he heard a light footstep in the hall, then a knock on his door.

“I heard you laughing and knew you couldn’t be working, so I just knocked,” said Dilford Bancroft, innocently ignoring the very unusual fact that Haydock had on neither coat nor waistcoat, that a shaded student lamp was the only light in the room, and that several open books and some scattered notes lay on the table. “What’s the joke?” he asked. Then without waiting for an answer, “Hasn’t Billy come yet?”

“Is Billy coming?” said Haydock, with an interest that sprang solely from alarm.

“Oh, yes—he’ll be here,” answered Dilly, reassuring any foolish doubts on that question. He had opened the piano and was striking careful discords in the bass, “I was sure you were talking to him when I came in; he said he’d bring round his system.”

“His what?”

“Why, his system—the ‘Rhyming Road,’ he calls it. You’re going to give us a seminar, you know—the exam comes to-morrow; and he’s going to bring round his notes and the ‘Rhyming Road’ to help out.”

Haydock was hearing of this little arrangement for the first time. He hadn’t seen Billy since the return from Providence.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he began; “I have no end of work myself and—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” broke in Dilly, a trifle impatiently, without turning from the piano; “you see we never thought about it ourselves until this afternoon, when we found out that the exam comes to-morrow. We were sure you’d do it,” he wheeled slowly about until he faced Haydock; “because neither of us know anything, and if you don’t—we’ll fail.”

Haydock met this plaint with the worried silence of one who dimly foresees his own end. Dilly couldn’t have made a more persuasive appeal if he had tried. Its strength lay in the fact that Dilly hadn’t tried; he had simply laid bare, with an apparently childlike trust in Haydock’s wisdom, his own and Billy’s hopeless inconsequence. It was rather late in the day to discuss the matter.

“We were counting on you,” Dilly sighed, and looked at the floor. He ventured this statement in the hope of keeping the subject alive; somehow it had seemed to languish.

“I confess I don’t understand you two,” Haydock burst out. Every one who had the pleasure of knowing Billy and Dilly took refuge in this exclamation at one time or another. “How the devil have you managed to hang on here for four months? And why on earth did you come to college at all?” he shook the boy by the shoulders.

Dilly’s apologia might have been interesting. He had on occasions attempted—by request—to defend the fact of his being at Harvard; but as he had always prefaced his few remarks with, “To begin with, I am of a taciturn disposition,” and as no one was quite willing to believe that he had a glimmer of the meaning of “taciturn,” he had never been allowed to proceed from that point. To-night the appearance of Billy with an armful of note-books made explanation impossible.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re not working,” said Billy, sweetly, all the note-books—there were six of them—fell to the floor when he sat down; “because we couldn’t have disturbed you, and I don’t know what we’d have done—Dilford’s told you?”

“Yes, Dilford has told me,” answered Haydock. He knew that then was the time to escort these young gentlemen to the hall, and lock the door in their faces. But he allowed it to slip by, and it never returned.

“Well, then—I don’t see why we shouldn’t dash right along. What do you think?” Billy looked from Haydock to Dilford and back again.

“What is it you want—and what are all those books doing?” Haydock asked wearily.

“Oh, these?” Billy allowed his feet to ramble among the volumes on the floor. “Oh, they’re just notes—History and French and things; there were no matches in my room, and I was in a hurry, so I had to bring them all. The Literature ones are there too; but they’re rather—rather—what shall I say?” He refrained delicately from saying what was the simple truth,—that his notes on all subjects were an illegible muddle, beginning nowhere—arriving nowhere. “Things come to me at such odd times,” he went on, “I just jot them down. Anyhow you won’t need notes; we merely want you to give us some idea to go by,” he fluttered his slender hand comprehensively, “an idea of literature.”

“Yes,” put in Dilly, stirred by the practical common sense of the suggestion, “the examination, I think, is about literature.”

“You think—good God, child, don’t you know?” Haydock mopped his forehead on the back of his arm, and stared at the two incredulously.

“Oh, he’ll catch on all right,” said Billy, easily. “You see the course only came once a week, and Darnell lectures so fast that, sitting away in the back of the room as we do—”

“You prefer, on the whole, to stay away entirely, or make the hour pass as rapidly as possible. Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Haydock, drily. He picked up one of Billy’s books marked “English 28,” and opened it at random, to a page devoted to the diagrams and scores of the “Harvard University Tit Tat Too and Cent Matching Association. Originators and Sole Proprietors, William Prescott Ware and Dilford Bancroft. Honorary member: President Eliot.” On the page following was a fragmentary list of the writers whose lives and achievements had been taken up in the course. After the name of Jane Austen, came the announcement, in parentheses, that “this woman was a man.” The startling bit of literary gossip was annotated by: “I was mistaken—it was George Eliot who was a woman.”

“That almost flunked me at the hour exam,” explained Billy, diffidently. “They’re so fussy about things here.” He was looking over Haydock’s shoulder. “It would have, I think, if I hadn’t thrown a new light on the temperament of Swift.”

“I’ll warrant you did,” said Haydock. “What on earth is this?” The list was followed by page after page of scrappy-looking verse.

“Oh, that’s the Rhyming Road,” exclaimed Billy, not without pride. “It sums everything up and helps the memory. See now—I never can forget about that old Eliot woman as long as I live.” Haydock followed Billy’s guiding finger, and read a stanza that began:—

“And this one on Matthew Arnold,” continued Billy, “gives the whole man away at once—”

“And Richardson—”

“Do you see? It goes on like that, only I haven’t had time yet to make the thing complete. Now let’s begin; it’s late.”

Haydock closed the book thoughtfully and went over to the window. He stood a moment looking out at the thick fog, and wondering what he should do. He hadn’t the slightest intention any longer of spending the rest of the night in a futile effort to scrape Billy through an examination. The child had already cut two, and failed in one, John had said. But the senior was in doubt as to whether his concern in the mess young Ware had made of his first few months of college, ought to end there, with a bland “good-night,” or whether he ought to see the thing out, in—say, the manner in which he would engineer the calamity, had Billy happened to be his young brother. A senior feels toward a freshman, older than he will ever feel toward anything again—older, probably, than he will feel even when called on to give advice to his own offspring. Haydock realised so well what was going to happen to Billy—Billy, whose progress in college from the first, had been the progress of a flimsy butterfly in a stiff breeze. He knew to an inch the quantity of perfectly necessary but distressing red tape that would have to be measured before Mrs. Ware and the college Office could come to anything like a common understanding. And even then Mrs. Ware wouldn’t understand much of anything. It always seemed to Haydock that men and women in becoming parents somehow or other managed to forfeit a great deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist with children, if this was a provision or a perversion of nature. Mrs. Ware was the sort of woman who would take an hour and a half to inform the Dean that William was a “good boy at heart,”—that his cheerfulness had always been “a ray of sunshine” in her life; the Dean, all the while, knowing that the twenty-five young men he had summoned to appear before him that morning, were waiting apprehensively in the outer office to “have it over with.” Since there was no question in Haydock’s mind just then of how to keep Billy in college, he asked himself if it wouldn’t be less painful to every one concerned to get him out with decency and despatch.

“It’s late,” repeated Dilly, listlessly.

“Yes, that’s the trouble,” said Haydock, turning away from the window. He said it kindly, regretfully, but with a seriousness that rather alarmed Dilford, and could not be ignored by Billy. “It’s too late. There’s no use in being tiresome and melo-dramatic about the thing, but that’s the simple fact; you’ve come to the end of your string, and you’ve got to let go before they slap your hands and take it away from you. If you don’t know what it means,—probation, and cutting two exams, and flunking a third—”

“John told you that,” broke in Billy, angrily.

“And flunking again to-morrow, I’m sorry.” He was sorry, very, very sorry. “Because it prolongs the agony for everybody, your mother in particular.”

Dilford was sidling about the room, nearing the door by furtive stages. When Haydock glanced up, he was no longer there.

“I’m the last person in the world to advise running away as long as there’s any music to face. But there isn’t any more for you just now. The thing is played out, and you simply have to leave.” Haydock himself didn’t quite know what he meant by this tuneful figure of speech; but he thought it sounded rather well, and would impress Billy. “You know yourself that a smash of some kind is coming—you’ve known it for weeks.” The senior didn’t attempt to understand the mind in which a keen knowledge of approaching, but easily averted doom ran in a never converging parallel with an insatiable lust for the present. He merely knew that such minds could be, and that Billy’s, if left unmolested, was one of them. He undertook now to lead these lines to a point. He didn’t say very much, and his remarks weren’t in the least spiritual; as a matter of fact they were decidedly worldly. He didn’t remind Billy that his wickedness might eventually keep him out of the kingdom of Heaven, but told him,—which is of far more importance to a Harvard freshman—that if he went on making an ass of himself he would ruin his chances for the “Dickey.” Haydock played some variations on this seemingly simple theme, threw in a few merciless truths he had learned from John, an original reflection or two, and an unanswerable prediction of a general and depressing character.

“You must get out and go home, and think about it,” he ended.

Billy had probably already begun to act on the last of these suggestions, for in a minute or two he stuffed his head into the sofa-cushions and began to cry. Haydock returned to his Milton, and learned several pages to an accompaniment of smothered sobs, until Billy at length became quiet.

“Now we’ll go down and have a cool swim in the tank,” said Haydock, rousing him gently. They undressed in silence. Billy was pathetic and absurd in a long blanket wrapper, his face still wet with tears, pattering after Haydock through the halls to the bath.

“Maybe you had better see your ‘adviser,’” Haydock suggested, when they were back again in his room. Billy hadn’t spoken in the interval.

“I can’t—he hates me!” gulped Billy, turning away. Ordinarily he would have said that the man was “affreux.”

He went to bed and cried some more on the cool pillows. Haydock wrote out a respectful form of resignation from the college for him to copy in the morning, composed a letter to Mrs. Ware, tenderly adapted in all respects to that lady’s intellectual needs, and returned, when the fog at his windows was white with the morning, to Paradise Lost.

A DEAD ISSUE

MARCUS THORN, instructor in Harvard University, was thirty-two years old on the twentieth of June. He looked thirty-five, and felt about a hundred. When he got out of bed on his birthday morning, and pattered into the vestibule for his mail, the date at the top of the Crimson recalled the first of these unpleasant truths to him. His mirror—it was one of those detestable folding mirrors in three sections—enabled him to examine his bald spot with pitiless ease, reproduced his profile some forty-five times in quick succession, and made it possible for him to see all the way round himself several times at once. It was this devilish invention that revealed fact number two to Mr. Thorn, while he was brushing his hair and tying his necktie. One plus two equalled three, as usual, and Thorn felt old and unhappy. But he didn’t linger over his dressing to philosophise on the evanescence of youth; he didn’t even murmur,—

He could do that sort of thing very well; he had been doing it steadily for five months. But this morning, the reality of the situation—impressed upon him by the date of his birth—led him to adopt more practical measures. What he actually did, was to disarrange his hair a little on top,—fluff it up to make it look more,—and press it down toward his temples to remove the appearance of having too much complexion for the size of his head. Then he went out to breakfast.

Thorn’s birthday had fallen, ironically, on one of those rainwashed, blue-and-gold days when “all nature rejoices.” The whitest of clouds were drifting across the bluest of skies when the instructor walked out into the Yard; the elms rustled gently in the delicate June haze, and the robins hopped across the yellow paths, freshly sanded, and screamed in the sparkling grass. All nature rejoiced, and in so doing got very much on Thorn’s nerves. When he reached his club, he was a most excellent person not to breakfast with.

It was early—half-past eight—and no one except Prescott, a sophomore, and Wynne, a junior, had dropped in as yet. Wynne, with his spectacles on, was sitting in the chair he always sat in at that hour, reading the morning paper. Thorn knew that he would read it through from beginning to end, carefully put his spectacles back in their case, and then go to the piano and play the “Blue Danube.” By that time his eggs and coffee would be served. Wynne did this every morning, and the instructor, who at the beginning of the year had regarded the boy’s methodical habits at the club as “quaint,”—suggestive, somehow, of the first chapter of “Pendennis,”—felt this morning that the “Blue Danube” before breakfast would be in the nature of a last straw. Prescott, looking as fresh and clean as the morning, was laughing over an illustrated funny paper. He merely nodded to Thorn, although the instructor hadn’t breakfasted there for many months, and called him across to enjoy something. Thorn glanced at the paper and smiled feebly.

“I don’t see how you can do it at this hour,” he said; “I would as soon drink flat champagne.” Prescott understood but vaguely what the man was talking about, yet he didn’t appear disturbed or anxious for enlightenment.

“I’ll have my breakfast on the piazza,” Thorn said to the steward who answered his ring. Then he walked nervously out of the room.

From the piazza he could look over a tangled barrier of lilac bushes and trellised grapevines into an old-fashioned garden. A slim lady in a white dress and a broad brimmed hat that hid her face was cutting nasturtiums and humming placidly to herself. Thorn thought she was a young girl, until she turned and revealed the fact that she was not a young girl—that she was about his own age. This seemed to annoy him in much the same way that the robins and Wynne and the funny paper had, for he threw himself into a low steamer-chair where he wouldn’t have to look at the woman, and gave himself up to a sort of luxurious melancholy.

In October, nine months before, Thorn had appeared one evening in the doorway of the club dining-room after a more or less continuous absence of eight years from Cambridge. It was the night before college opened, and the dining-room was crowded. For an instant there was an uproar of confused greetings; then Haydock and Ellis and Sears Wolcott and Wynne—the only ones Thorn knew—pushed back from the table and went forward to shake hands with him. Of the nine or ten boys still left at the table by this proceeding, those whose backs were turned to the new arrival stopped eating and waited without looking around, to be introduced to the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Their companions opposite paused too; some of them laid their napkins on the table. They, however, could glance up and see that the newcomer was a dark man of thirty years or more. They supposed, correctly, that he was an “old graduate” and a member of the club.

“You don’t know any of these people, do you?” said Haydock, taking him by the arm; “what a devil of a time you’ve been away from this place.”

“I know that that’s a Prescott,” laughed the graduate. In his quick survey of the table, while the others had been welcoming him back, his eyes had rested a moment on a big fellow with light hair. Everybody laughed, because it really was a Prescott and all Prescotts were simply more or less happy replicas of all other Prescotts. “I know your brothers,” said the graduate, shaking hands with the boy, who had risen.

“It’s Mr. Thorn.” Haydock made this announcement loud enough to be heard by the crowd. He introduced every one, prefixing “Mr.” to the names of the first few, but changing to given and even nicknames before completing the circuit of the table. The humour of some of these last,—“Dink,” “Pink,” and “Mary,” for instance,—lost sight of in long established usage, suggested itself anew; and the fellows laughed again as they made a place for Thorn at the crowded table.

“It’s six years, isn’t it?” Haydock asked politely. The others had begun to babble cheerfully again of their own affairs.

“Six! I wish it were; it’s eight,” answered Thorn. “Eight since I left college. But of course I’ve been here two or three times since,—just long enough to make me unhappy at having to go back to Europe again.”

“And now you’re a great, haughty Ph. D. person, an ‘Officer of Instruction and Government,’ announced in the prospectus to teach in two courses,” mused Ellis, admiringly. “How do you like the idea?”

“It’s very good to be back,” said Thorn. He looked about the familiar room with a contented smile, while the steward bustled in and out to supply him with the apparatus of dining.

It was, indeed, good to be back. The satisfaction deepened and broadened with every moment. It was good to be again in the town, the house, the room that, during his life abroad, he had grown to look upon more as “home” than any place in the world; good to come back and find that the place had changed so little; good, for instance, when he ordered a bottle of beer, to have it brought to him in his own mug, with his name and class cut in the pewter,—just as if he had never been away at all. This was but one of innumerable little things that made Thorn feel that at last he was where he belonged; that he had stepped into his old background; that it still fitted. The fellows, of course, were recent acquisitions—all of them. Even his four acquaintances had entered college long since his own time. But the crowd, except that it seemed to him a gathering decidedly younger than his contemporaries had been at the same age, was in no way strange to him. There were the same general types of young men up and down the table, and at both ends, that he had known in his day. They were discussing the same topics, in the same tones and inflections, that had made the dinner-table lively in the eighties,—which was not surprising when he considered that certain families belong to certain clubs at Harvard almost as a matter of course, and that some of the boys at the table were the brothers and cousins of his own classmates. He realised, with a glow of sentiment, that he had returned to his own people after years of absence in foreign lands; a performance whose emotional value was not decreased for Thorn by the conviction, just then, that his own people were better bred, and better looking, and better dressed than any he had met elsewhere. As he looked about at his civilised surroundings, and took in, from the general chatter, fragments of talk,—breezy and cosmopolitan with incidents of the vacation just ended,—he considered his gratification worth the time he had been spending among the fuzzy young gentlemen of a German university.

Thorn, like many another college antiquity, might have been the occasion of a mutual feeling of constraint had he descended upon this undergraduate meal in the indefinite capacity of “an old graduate.” The ease with which he filled his place at the table, and the effortless civility that acknowledged his presence there, were largely due to his never having allowed his interest in the life of the club to wane during his years away from it. He knew the sort of men the place had gone in for, and, in many instances, their names as well. Some of his own classmates—glad, no doubt, of so congenial an item for their occasional European letters—had never failed to write him, in diverting detail, of the great Christmas and spring dinners. And they, in turn, had often read extracts from Thorn’s letters to them, when called on to speak at these festivities. More than once the graduate had sent, from the other side of the world, some doggerel verses, a sketch to be used as a dinner-card, or a trifling addition to the club’s library or dining-room. Haydock and Ellis and Wolcott and Wynne he had met at various times abroad. He had made a point of hunting them up and getting to know them, with the result that his interest had succeeded in preserving his identity; he was not unknown to the youngest member of the club. If they didn’t actually know him, they at least knew of him. Even this crust is sweet to the returned graduate whose age is just far enough removed from either end of life’s measure to make it intrinsically unimportant.

“What courses do you give?” It was the big Prescott, sitting opposite, who asked this. The effort involved a change of colour.

“You’d better look out, or you’ll have Pink in your class the first thing you know,” some one called, in a voice of warning, from the other end of the table.

“Yes; he’s on the lookout for snaps,” said some one else.

“Then he’d better stay away from my lectures,” answered Thorn, smiling across at Prescott, who blushed some more at this sudden convergence of attention on himself. “They say that new instructors always mark hard—just to show off.”

“I had you on my list before I knew who you were,” announced another. “I thought the course looked interesting; you’ll have to let me through.”

“Swipe! swipe!” came in a chorus from around the table. This bantering attitude toward his official position pleased Thorn, perhaps, more than anything else. It flattered and reassured him as to the impression his personality made on younger—much younger—men. He almost saw in himself the solution of the perennial problem of “How to bring about a closer sympathy between instructor and student.”

After dinner Haydock and Ellis took him from room to room, and showed him the new table, the new rugs, the new books, ex dono this, that, and the other member. In the library he came across one of his own sketches, prettily framed. Some of his verses had been carefully pasted into the club scrap-book. Ellis and Haydock turned to his class photograph in the album, and laughed. It was not until long afterwards that he wondered if they had done so because the picture had not yet begun to lose its hair. When they had seen everything from the kitchen to the attic, they went back to the big room where the fellows were drinking their coffee and smoking. Others had come in in the interval; they were condoling gaily with those already arrived, on the hard luck of having to be in Cambridge once more. Thorn stood with his back to the fireplace, and observed them.

It was anything but a representative collection of college men. There were athletes, it was true,—Prescott was one,—and men who helped edit the college papers, and men who stood high in their studies, and others who didn’t stand anywhere, talking and chaffing in that room. But it was characteristic of the life of the college that these varied distinctions had in no way served to bring the fellows together there. That Ellis would, without doubt, graduate with a magna, perhaps a summa cum laude, was a matter of interest to no one but Ellis. That Prescott had played admirable foot-ball on Soldiers’ Field the year before, and would shortly do it again, made Prescott indispensable to the Eleven, perhaps, but it didn’t in the least enhance his value to the club. In fact, it kept him away so much, and sent him to bed so early, that his skill at the game was, at times, almost deplored. That Haydock once in a while contributed verses of more than ordinary merit to the “Monthly” and “Advocate” had nearly kept him out of the club altogether. It was the one thing against him,—he had to live it down. On the whole, the club, like all of the five small clubs at Harvard whose influence is the most powerful, the farthest reaching influence in the undergraduate life of the place, rather prided itself in not being a reward for either the meritorious or the energetic. It was composed of young men drawn from the same station in life, the similarity of whose past associations and experience, in addition to whatever natural attractions they possessed, rendered them mutually agreeable. The system was scarcely broadening, but it was very delightful. And as the graduate stood there watching the fellows—brown and exuberant after the long vacation—come and go, discussing, comparing, or simply fooling, but always frankly absorbed in themselves and one another, he could not help thinking that however much such institutions had helped to enfeeble the class spirit of days gone by, they had a rather exquisite, if less diffusive spirit of their own. He liked the liveliness of the place, the broad, simple terms of intimacy on which every one seemed to be with every one else, the freedom of speech and action. Not that he had any desire to bombard people with sofa-cushions, as Sears Wolcott happened to be doing at that instant, or even to lie on his back in the middle of the centre-table with his head under the lamp, and read the “Transcript,” as some one else had done most of the evening; but he enjoyed the environment that made such things possible and unobjectionable.

“I must make a point of coming here a great deal,” reflected Thorn.

The next day college opened. More men enrolled in Thorn’s class that afternoon than he thought would be attracted by the subject he was announced to lecture in on that day of the week. Among all the students who straggled, during the hour, into the bare recitation-room at the top of Sever, the only ones whose individualities were distinct enough to impress themselves on Thorn’s unpractised memory, were a negro, a stained ivory statuette of a creature from Japan, a middle-aged gentleman with a misplaced trust in the efficacy of a flowing sandy beard for concealing an absence of collar and necktie, Prescott, and Haydock. Prescott surprised him. There was a crowd around the desk when he appeared, and Thorn didn’t get a chance to speak to him; but he was pleased to have the boy enrol in his course,—more pleased somehow than if there had been any known intellectual reason for his having done such a thing; more pleased, for instance, than he was when Haydock strolled in a moment or two later, although he knew that the senior would get from his teachings whatever there was in them. Haydock was the last to arrive before the hour ended. Thorn gathered up his pack of enrolment cards, and the two left the noisy building together.

“Prescott enrolled just a minute or two before you did,” said Thorn, as they walked across the Yard. He was a vain man in a quiet way.

“Yes,” answered Haydock drily, “he said your course came at a convenient hour,” he didn’t add that, from what he knew of Prescott, complications might, under the circumstances, be looked for.

“Shall I see you at dinner?” Thorn asked before they separated.

“Oh, are you going to eat at the club?” Haydock had wondered the night before how much the man would frequent the place.

“Why, yes, I thought I would—for a time at least.” No other arrangement had ever occurred to Thorn.

“That’s good—I’m glad,” said the senior; he asked himself, as he walked away, why truthful people managed to lie so easily and so often in the course of a day. As a matter of fact, he was vaguely sorry for what Thorn had just told him. Haydock didn’t object to the instructor. Had his opinion been asked, he would have said, with truth, that he liked the man. For Thorn was intelligent, and what Haydock called “house broken,” and the two had once spent a pleasant week together in Germany. It was not inhospitality, but a disturbed sense of the fitness of things that made Haydock regret Thorn’s apparent intention of becoming so intimate with his juniors. The instructor’s place, Haydock told himself, was with his academic colleagues, at the Colonial Club—or wherever it was that they ate.

Thorn did dine with the undergraduates that night, and on many nights following. It was a privilege he enjoyed for a time exceedingly. It amused him, and, after the first few weeks of his new life in Cambridge, he craved amusement. For in spite of the work he did for the college—the preparing and delivering of lectures, the reading and marking of various written tasks, and the enlightening, during consultation hours, of long haired, long winded seekers after truth, whose cold, insistent passion for the literal almost crazed him—he was often profoundly bored. He had not been away from Cambridge long enough to outlive the conviction, acquired in his Freshman year, that the residents of that suburb would prove unexhilarating if in a moment of inadvertence he should ever chance to meet any of them. But he had been too long an exile to retain a very satisfactory grasp on contemporary Boston. Of course he hunted up some of his classmates he had known well. Most of them were men of affairs in a way that was as yet small enough to make them seem to Thorn aggressively full of purpose. They were all glad to see him. Some of them asked him to luncheon in town at hours that proved inconvenient to one living in Cambridge; some of them had wives, and asked him to call on them. He did so, and found them to be nice women. But this he had suspected before. Two of his classmates were rich beyond the dreams of industry. They toiled not, and might have been diverting if they hadn’t—both of them—happened to be unspeakably dull men. For one reason or another, he found it impossible to see his friends often enough to get into any but a very lame sort of step with their lives. Thorn’s occasional meetings with them left him melancholy, sceptical as to the depth of their natures and his own, cynical as to the worth of college friendships—friendships that had depended, for their warmth, so entirely on propinquity—on the occasion. His most absorbing topics of conversation with the men he had once known—his closest ties—were after all issues very trivial and very dead. Dinner with a classmate he grew to look on as either suicide, or a post mortem.

It was the club with its fifteen or twenty undergraduate members that went far at first toward satisfying his idle moments. Dead issues, other than the personal traditions that added colour and atmosphere to the every day life of the place, were given no welcome there. The thrill of the fleeting present was enough. The life Thorn saw there was, as far as he could tell, more than complete with the healthy joy of eating and drinking, of going to the play, of getting hot and dirty and tired over athletics, and cool and clean and hungry again afterwards. The instructor was entranced by its innocence—its unconscious contentment. It was so unlike his own life of recent years, he told himself; it was so “physical.” He liked to stop at the club late in the winter afternoons, after a brisk walk on Brattle Street. There was always a crowd around the fire at that hour, and no room that he could remember had ever seemed so full of warmth and sympathy as the big room where the fellows sat, at five o’clock on a winter’s day, with the curtains drawn and the light of the fire flickering up the dark walls and across the ceiling. He often dropped in at midnight, or even later. The place was rarely quite deserted. Returned “theatre bees” came there to scramble eggs and drink beer, instead of tarrying with the mob at the Victoria or the Adams House. In the chill of the small hours, a herdic load of boys from some dance in town would often stream in to gossip and get warm, or to give the driver a drink after the long cold drive across the bridge. And Thorn, who had not been disposed to gather up and cling to the dropped threads of his old interests, who was not wedded to his work, who was not sufficient unto himself, enjoyed it all thoroughly, unreservedly—for a time.

For a time only. For as the winter wore on, the inevitable happened—or rather the expected didn’t happen, which is pretty much the same thing after all. Thorn, observant, analytical, and—where he himself was not concerned—clever, grew to know the fellows better than they knew themselves. Before he had lived among them three months, he had appreciated their respective temperaments, he had taken the measure of their ambitions and limitations, he had catalogued their likes and dislikes, he had pigeon-holed their weaknesses and illuminated their virtues. Day after day, night after night, consciously and unconsciously, he had observed them in what was probably the frankest, simplest intercourse of their lives. And he knew them.

But they didn’t know him. Nor did it ever occur to them that they wanted to or could. They were not seeking the maturer companionship Thorn had to give; they were not seeking much of anything. They took life as they found it near at hand, and Thorn was far, very far away. For them, the niche he occupied could have been filled by any gentleman of thirty-two with a kind interest in them and an affection for the club. To him, they were everything that made the world, as he knew it just then, interesting and beautiful. Youth, energy, cleanliness were the trinity Thorn worshipped. And they were young, strong, and undefiled. Yet, after the first pleasure at being back had left him, Thorn was not a happy man, although he had not then begun to tell himself so.

The seemingly unimportant question presented by his own name began to worry him a little as the weeks passed into months. First names and the absurd sounds men had answered to from babyhood were naturally in common use at the club. Thorn dropped into the way of them easily, as a matter of course. Not to have done so would, in time, have become impossible. The fellows would have thought it strange—formal. Yet the name of “Marcus” was rarely heard there. Haydock, once in a while, called him that, after due premeditation. Sears Wolcott occasionally used it by way of a joke—as if he were taking an impertinent liberty, and rather enjoyed doing it. But none of the other men ever did. On no occasion had any one said “Marcus” absent-mindedly, and then looked embarrassed, as Thorn had hoped might happen. It hurt him a little always to be called “Thorn;” to be appealed to in the capacity of “Mr. Thorn,” as he sometimes was by the younger members, positively annoyed him. Prescott was the most incorrigible in this respect. He had come from one of those fitting schools where all speech between master and pupil is carried on to a monotonous chant of “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I think so, sir.” He had ideas, or rather habits,—for Prescott’s ideas were few,—of deference to those whose mission it was to assist in his education that Thorn found almost impossible to displace. For a long time—until the graduate laughed and asked him not to—he prefixed the distasteful “Mr.” to Thorn’s name. Then, for as long again, he refrained markedly from calling him anything. One afternoon he came into the club where the instructor was alone, writing a letter, and after fussing for a time among the magazines on the table, he managed to say,—

“Thorn, do you know whether Sears has been here since luncheon?”

Thorn didn’t know and he didn’t care, but had Prescott handed him an appointment to an assistant professor’s chair, instead of having robbed him a little of what dignity he possessed, he would not have been so elated by half. Prescott continued to call him “Thorn” after that, but always with apparent effort,—as if aware that in doing it he was not living quite up to his principles. This trouble with his name might have served Thorn as an indication of what his position actually was in the tiny world he longed so much to be part of once more. But he was not a clever man where he himself was concerned.

Little things hurt him constantly without opening his eyes. For instance, it rarely occurred to the fellows that the instructor might care to join them in any of their hastily planned expeditions to town after dinner. Not that he was ostracised; he was simply overlooked. When he did go to the theatre, he bought the tickets himself, and asked Prescott or Sears, or some of them, to go with him. The occasion invariably lacked the charm of spontaneity. When he invited any of them to dine with him in town, as he often did, they went, if they hadn’t anything else to do, and seemed to enjoy their dinner. But to Thorn these feasts were a series of disappointments. He always got up from the table with a sense of having failed in something. What? He didn’t know—he couldn’t have told. He was like a man who shoots carefully at nothing, and then feels badly because he hits it. He persisted in loitering along sunny lanes, and growing melancholy because they led nowhere. It was Sears Wolcott who took even the zest of anticipation out of Thorn’s little dinners in town, by saying to the graduate one evening,—

“What’s the point of going to the Victoria for dinner? It’s less trouble, and a damned sight livelier, to eat out here.” Sears had what Haydock called, “that disagreeable habit of hitting promiscuously from the shoulder.” The reaction on Thorn of all this was at last a dawning suspicion of his own unimportance. By the time the midyear examinations came, he felt somehow as if he were “losing ground;” he hadn’t reached the point yet of realising that he never had had any. He used to throw down his work in a fit of depression and consult his three-sided mirror apprehensively.

The big Prescott, however, became the real problem, around which the others were as mere corollaries. It was he who managed, in his “artless Japanese way,” as the fellows used to call it, to crystallise the situation, to bring it to a pass where Thorn’s rather unmanly sentimentality found itself confronted by something more definite and disturbing than merely the vanishing point of youth. Prescott accomplished this very simply, by doing the poorest kind of work—no work at all, in fact—in the course he was taking from Thorn. Barely, and by the grace of the instructor, had he scraped through the first examination in November. Since then he had rested calmly, like a great monolith, on his laurels. He went to Thorn’s lectures only after intervals of absence that made his going at all a farce. He ignored the written work of the course, and the reports on outside reading, with magnificent completeness. Altogether, he behaved as he wouldn’t have behaved had he ever for a moment considered Thorn in any light other than that of an instructor, an officer of the college, a creature to whom deference—servility, almost—was due when he was compelled to talk to him, but to whom all obligation ended there. His attitude was not an unusual one among college “men” who have not outgrown the school idea, but the attendant circumstances were. For Thorn’s concern over Prescott’s indifference to the course was aroused by a strong personal attachment, one in which an ordinary professorial interest had nothing to do. He smarted at his failure to attract the boy sufficiently to draw him to his lectures; yet he looked with a sort of panic toward the approaching day when he should be obliged, in all conscience, to flunk him in the midyear examination. He admired Prescott, as little, intelligent men sometimes do admire big, stupid ones. He idealised him, and even went the length, one afternoon when taking a walk with Haydock, of telling the senior that under Prescott’s restful, olympic exterior he thought there lurked a soul. To which Haydock had answered with asperity, “Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” and let the subject drop. Later in the walk, Haydock announced, irrelevantly, and with a good deal of vigour, that if he ever made or inherited millions, he would establish a chair in the university, call it the “Haydock Professorship of Common Sense,” and respectfully suggest to the President and Faculty that the course be made compulsory.

Thorn would have spoken to the soulful Prescott,—told him gently that he didn’t seem to be quite in sympathy with the work of the course,—if Prescott had condescended to go to his lectures in the six or seven weeks between the end of the Christmas recess and the examination period. But Prescott cut Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at half-past two o’clock, with a regularity that, considered as regularity, was admirable. Toward the last, he did drop in every now and then, sit near the door, and slip out again before the hour was ended. This was just after he had been summoned by the Recorder to the Office for “cutting.” Thorn never got a chance to speak to him. He might have approached the boy at the club; but the instructor shrank from taking advantage of his connection with that place to make a delicate official duty possible. He had all along avoided “shop” there so elaborately,—had made so light of it when the subject had come up,—that he couldn’t bring himself at that late day to arise, viper like, from the hearthstone and smite. A note of warning would have had to be light, facetious, and consequently without value, in order not to prove a very false and uncalled for note indeed. The ready coöperation of the Dean, Thorn refrained from calling on; he was far from wishing to get Prescott into difficulties.

By the time the examination day arrived, the instructor was in a state of turmoil that in ordinary circumstances would have been excessive and absurd. In the case of Thorn, it was half pathetic, half contemptible. He knew that in spite of Prescott’s soul (a superabundance of soul is, as a matter of fact, a positive hindrance in passing examinations), the boy would do wretchedly. To give him an E—the lowest possible mark, always excepting, of course, the jocose and sarcastic F—would be to bring upon himself Prescott’s everlasting anger and “despision.” Of this Thorn was sure. Furthermore, the mark would not tend to make the instructor wildly popular at the club; for although everybody was willing to concede that Prescott was not a person of brilliant mental attainments, he was very much beloved. One hears a good deal about the “rough justice of boys.” Thorn knew that such a thing existed, and did not doubt but that, in theory, he would be upheld by the members of the club if he gave Prescott an E, and brought the heavy hand of the Office down on him. But the justice of boys, he reflected, was, after all, rough; it would acknowledge his right to flunk Prescott, perhaps, and, without doubt, hate him cordially for doing it. Thorn’s aversion to being hated was almost morbid.

If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,—gave him, say, the undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,—well, that would be tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass.

When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there. That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness. Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college. There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly—without opening it—into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s midyear mark in the records as C.

No lectures are given in the college during the midyears. Men who are fortunate enough to finish their examinations early in the period can run away to New York, to the country, to Old Point Comfort, to almost anywhere that isn’t Cambridge, and recuperate. Haydock went South. Ellis and Wynne tried a walking trip in the Berkshire Hills, and, after two days’ floundering in the mud, waded to the nearest train for a city. Boston men went to Boston—except Sears Wolcott and Prescott, who disappeared to some wild and inaccessible New England hamlet to snow-shoe or spear fish or shoot rabbits; no one could with authority say which, as the two had veiled their preparations in mystery. So it happened that Thorn didn’t see Prescott for more than a week after he had marked his book. In the mean time he had become used to the idea of having done it according to a somewhat unconventional system—to put it charitably. He passed much of the time in which the fellows were away, alone; for the few who went to the club, went there with note-books under their arms and preoccupied expressions in their eyes. They kept a sharp look-out for unexpected manœuvres on the part of the clock, and had a general air of having to be in some place else very soon. Thorn, thrown on his own resources, had a mild experience of what Cambridge can be without a crowd to play with, and came to the conclusion that, for his own interest and pleasure in life, he had done wisely in not incurring Prescott’s ill-will and startling the club in the new rôle of hard-hearted, uncompromising pedagogue. The insignificant part he played in the lives of the undergraduates was far from satisfying; but it was the sort of half a loaf one doesn’t willingly throw away. By the time Prescott came back, Thorn had so wholly accepted his own view of the case that he was totally unprepared for the way in which the boy took the news of his mark. He met Prescott in the Yard the morning college opened again, and stopped to speak to him. He wouldn’t have referred to the examination—it was enough to know that the little crisis had passed—had not Prescott, blushing uneasily, and looking over Thorn’s shoulder at something across the Yard, said,—