he
plaudits which would burst out from the throats of his fellow-students,
and, indeed, from the whole audience, when he came on to doff his cap
and kneel before the Chancellor to take from his hands the honours he
had won, would be given in recognition of the most brilliant degree of
the year.

And _she_, too, would be there with her father and mother, and his
father, all sharing in his triumph, all glorying in his success, in this
splendid fruition of the labours, which, for so many years, they had
watched with such intensely sympathetic interest.

Under any other circumstances this would have meant to him even more
than the mere formal triumph; for though he had worked honestly and
single-heartedly for the prizes of his academic career, he had also
worked for them as an athlete might have striven for his laurels in the
Olympian Games, or a knight of the Age of Chivalry might have fought for
his laurels to lay them at the feet of his lady-love.

Now he had won them--and after all what were they worth? This was not
only to be a day of triumph for him. It was to be a day of hardest
trial and most bitter sacrifice as well; a trial which, as he knew even
now, would strain his moral fibre very nearly to the breaking point. It
was a struggle for which he had been bracing himself ever since that
last conversation which he had had with Enid. From that day to this he
had never clasped her hand or looked into her eyes.

That had been the agreement between them, and also between his father
and her parents. They were not to meet again until he had finished his
university career and taken his degree. That, as they thought, would
give them both time enough to think--to remain faithful, or to think
better of it, as the case might be--and, most important of all for Vane,
to determine by the help of more deliberate thought and added
experience, and by converse with minds older and more deeply versed in
the laws of human nature than his own, whether or not that resolve,
which he had taken when he first discovered that there was a taint of
poison in his blood, should be kept or not.

But now it was all over--although it ought only to have been just
beginning. This day, which ought to have been the brightest of his life,
was, in reality, to be the darkest. The golden gates of the Eden of Love
lay open before him, but, instead of entering them, he must pass by with
eyes averted, and enter instead the sombre portals of his life's
Get