the horse-play of his friends would make him appear a
bad loser. "It would look, boys," he said, "as though I couldn't take my
medicine. Looks like kicking against the umpire's decision. Old Gilman
fought fair. He gave me just what was coming to me. I think a darn sight
more of him than do of that bunch of boot-lickers that had the colossal
nerve to pretend I scored fifty!"

Doctor Gilman sat in his cottage that stood the edge of the campus,
gazing at a plaster bust of Socrates which he did not see. Since that
morning he had ceased to sit in the chair of history at Stillwater
College. They were retrenching, the chancellor had told him curtly,
cutting down unnecessary expenses, for even in his anger Doctor Black
was too intelligent to hint at his real motive, and the professor was
far too innocent of evil, far too detached from college politics to
suspect. He would remain a professor emeritus on half pay, but he no
longer would teach. The college he had served for thirty years-since
it consisted of two brick buildings and a faculty of ten young men--no
longer needed him. Even his ivy-covered cottage, in which his wife and
he had lived for twenty years, in which their one child had died, would
at the beginning of the next term be required of him. But the college
would allow him those six months in which to "look round." So, just
outside the circle of light from his student lamp, he sat in his study,
and stared with unseeing eyes at the bust of Socrates. He was not
considering ways and means. They must be faced later. He was considering
how he could possibly break the blow to his wife. What eviction from
that house would mean to her no one but he understood. Since the day
their little girl had died, nothing in the room that had been her
playroom, bedroom, and nursery had been altered, nothing had been
touched. To his wife, somewhere in the house that wonderful, God-given
child was still with them. Not as a memory but as a real and living
presence. When at night the professor and his wife sat at either end
of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he would see her suddenly
lift her head, alert and eager, as though from the nursery floor a step
had sounded, as though from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her.
And when they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some
students' boarding-house, though they could take with them their books,
their furniture, their mutual love and comradeship, they must leave