that this is not another of
those caprices to which you have been subject, nor a desire to shirk
honest work. Mr. Wood has made out a strong case for you, and I have
therefore determined to give you a trial. If you pass the examinations
with credit, you may go to college, but if at any time you fail to
make good progress, you come home, and go into business again. Is that
thoroughly understood?"

I said it was, and thanked him effusively.... I had escaped,--the prison
doors had flown open. But it is written that every happiness has
its sting; and my joy, intense though it was, had in it a core of
remorse....

I went downstairs to my mother, who was sitting in the hall by the open
door.

"Father says I may go!" I said.

She got up and took me in her arms.

"My dear, I am so glad, although we shall miss you dreadfully.... Hugh?"

"Yes, mother."

"Oh, Hugh, I so want you to be a good man!"

Her cry was a little incoherent, but fraught with a meaning that came
home to me, in spite of myself....

A while later I ran over to announce to the amazed Tom Peters that I
was actually going to Harvard with him. He stood in the half-lighted
hallway, his hands in his pockets, blinking at me.

"Hugh, you're a wonder!" he cried. "How in Jehoshaphat did you work
it?"...

I lay long awake that night thinking over the momentous change so soon
to come into my life, wondering exultantly what Nancy Willett would say
now. I was not one, at any rate, to be despised or neglected.

VI.

The following September Tom Peters and I went East together. In the
early morning Boston broke on us like a Mecca as we rolled out of the
old Albany station, joint lords of a "herdic." How sharply the smell of
the salt-laden east wind and its penetrating coolness come back to me! I
seek in vain for words to express the exhilarating effect of that briny
coolness on my imagination, and of the visions it summoned up of the
newer, larger life into which I had marvellously been transported. We
alighted at the Parker House, full-fledged men of the world, and tried
to act as though the breakfast of which we partook were merely an
incident, not an Event; as though we were Seniors, and not freshmen,
assuming an indifference to the beings by whom we were surrounded and
who were breakfasting, too,--although the nice-looking ones with fresh
faces and trim clothes were all undoubtedly Olympians. The better
to proclaim our nonchalance, we seated ourselv