always the greater mercy. This Bretton girl, I understand, has grown up with practically no home surroundings, being shifted about from one boarding school to another ever since her earliest childhood, and knowing apparently very little more about her people than even I have been able to glean. The circumstances are very sad, of course, very unfortunate, but our duty at the moment, of course, concerns itself with results, not causes. Looking back now to her first appearance among us two months ago I realize that there has always been something about her that was vaguely disquieting, vaguely suggestive of lawlessness. Her eyes, perhaps, her hair, some odd little trick of manner. Certainly," quickened the President, "I would not be doing my duty by the hundreds of innocent young girls committed to my care if——"
As though all life reverted then to the mere pursuit of hats and 48 coats and rubbers, the Faculty Meeting dissolved into individual interests again and dispersed as such along the gloomy corridor and down the creaking stairs.
It was winter-cold on the stairs.
Shuffling a little in his overshoes, jerking his coat-collar just a bit tighter around his throat, John Burnarde felt suddenly very old. "Old? Merciful Heavens!" he winced. He was only thirty-five! Did Age come like that to a man in just the time it took him to go up and down the same gray, creaky, familiar stairs? "Apple Blossoms was it that the old Mathematics Professor had said she looked like? But God knew it wasn't just her little face that was Apple Blossomy, but her little mind also, and the little glad gay heart of her! So fresh, so new, so virgin-sweet! By what foul chance, by what incalculable circumstance, had she blundered into this?"
Stripped of passion, stripped even of protest, stripped indeed of every human emotion except his dignity and his pain he pushed 49 his way blindly out through interminable heavy doors and breasted the winter night.
Then quite suddenly, stripped of every emotion except pain, he swung around in his tracks, remounted the stairs, re-entered the President's office, and slamming the door be hind him, flung down even his dignity on the altar of his love.
"Miss Merriwayne!" he said. "This thing that you propose doing—cannot be done! I am engaged to Miss Bretton!"
For a single instant only, every knowledge, manner, poise, that John Burnarde had been born with, defied every knowledge, manner, poise, that Claudia Merriwayne had worked forty years to acquire.
Then reverting suddenly to the identical accent with which Claudia Merriwayne's mother was still lashing Claudia Merriwayne's father, doubtless, in the little far away North Kansas home, the College President opened her thin lips to speak.
"The thing—is already done—Mr. Burnarde," she said. "Miss Bretton left town an hour ago—and with her paramour, I am told!"
"With her—what?" cried John Burnarde. 50
"With her 'paramour,'" repeated the President coolly.
"The word is unfortunate," frowned Burnarde.
"So—is the episode," said the President.
With a little sharp catch of his breath John Burnarde stepped forward to the edge of the desk.
"You understand that I am going to marry Miss Bretton?" he affirmed with some incisiveness.
"Not in my college!" said the President. "Nor in any other college if I even so much as remotely gauge either the professional or the social exigencies of the situation." Emphatically, but by no means extravagantly, she drove her meaning home. "Do you dream for one single moment, Mr. Burnarde," she quizzed, "that any reputable college in the land would accept, or maintain on its faculty," she added significantly, "a man whose wife for reasons of moral obliquity had not been considered a safe associate for——"
"You mean——" interrupted John Burnarde.
"Everything that I say," acquiesced the President, "and 51 everything that I imply."
"That is your ultimatum?" questioned John Burnarde.
"That is my ultimatum!" said the President.
With the slightest perceptible tightening of his lips John Burnarde began to put on his gloves.
"Very fortunately," he said, "there are other professions in the world besides the teaching of English."
"Very fortunately," conceded the President. One side of her mouth lifted very faintly with the concession. "Yet somehow, Mr. Burnarde," she added hastily, "I do not seem to picture you as a—as an automobile salesman, for instance. Nor yet visualize that frail, lovely mother of yours relinquishing very easily her life-long ambitions for your deanship—which up to now, of course, has by no means seemed the improbable fruition of your distinguished services with us. Your mother," mused the President, "has doubtless made some sacrifices for you—in her time?"
"Most mothers have!" snapped John Burnarde. 52
Roused snap for snap to his tone the President leaned forward suddenly.
"You're not the only man," she cried, "who has been both flouted and betrayed by Frivolity! Next time you choose——" Her cheeks flushed scarlet. "Next time you choose, perhaps you will choose more wisely, more consistently with your age and attainments! This mad infatuation is surely but the mood of a moment, the——" Recovering her self-control as quickly almost as she had lost it she sank back with typical statuesqueness into her throne- like Jacobean chair. "Surely, Mr. Burnarde," she asked in all sincerity, "you must admit that the—that the warning I have given you is at least—reasonable?"
"Absolutely reasonable!" said John Burnarde. "And absolutely damnable!" And turning on his heel he stalked from the room.
But even the winter night could not cool his cheeks now, nor the great pile of unread themes and forensics that he found awaiting him in his room, divert his tortured mind for one single second 53 from the problems of a lover to the problems of a professor. Somewhere indeed, he reasoned, among that white flare of papers a fresh stab of pain undoubtedly awaited him, a familiar handwriting strangely poignant, some little brand new bud of an idea forging valiantly upward through the clotted sod of academic tradition into the sunshine of acknowledged success, a purely prosy rhetorical question, perhaps, thrilled to its very interrogation mark by the sweet new secret hidden behind its formality!
With an irresistible impulse he began suddenly to rummage through the themes. Yes, here was the handwriting! With fingers that trembled he unfolded the page. Dated the very night before this dreadful thing had happened, surely somehow—somewhere on this very page the dreadful thing must be disproved!
"Dear Mr. Burnarde," ran the little note pinned to the page. "Dear Mr. Burnarde" (Oh, the delicious camouflage of the formality). Please, I beg of you do not be angry with me because I am submitting no prose theme this week! I just can't, somehow! I'm all verse these days! What do you think about this one? 54 There are oodles and oodles more lines to it of course, but this is to be the recurrent refrain:
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