ut I can't.
Oh, Professor Wayland," he cried, "there is an element in my grief that
is peculiar to itself, that no one else in sorrow ever had!"

"I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay." Again the
younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it
unchallenged.

The professor rose to his feet. "Good night," he said; "unless you will
go back with me. Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep." He
had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare
ourselves and one another.

"'Where the love light never, never dies,'"

The boy's voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of
the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds.
Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite
effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country. He
could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections
as slight--Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute
notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus
still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their
footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window. Such
the easy proficiency of affection.

Attention to the lad's singing suddenly was lifted above the
subconscious. The simple melody had entangled itself in some forgotten
association of the professor's boyhood, seeking to marshal which before
him, he received the full force of the single line sung in direct
ear-shot. Like the tune, the words also became a challenge; pricked
through the unregarded heaviness in which he was plying his familiar
task, and demanded that he should name its cause.

For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long! No, not
dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic. Burnt down, smoldered;
suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace. There was a touch of
contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind
and turned back to his work. And yet, he stopped a moment longer to
think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best
achievement!

The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over
which he had spent his evenings for more than a week. Most of them had
been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation
here and there which had made his progress slow. He examined a
half-dozen more, and then in sheer ment