le are."

There was a silence, during which the young man wrestled with the sudden
mad idea of offering to help Fifi with all her lessons each night--not
merely with the difficulties--thus enabling her to keep up with her
class with a minimum of work. Where such an impulse came from he could
not conjecture. He put it down with a stern hand. Personally, he felt,
he might be almost willing to make this splendid display of altruism;
but for the sake of posterity and the common good, he could not dream of
stealing so much time from the Magnum Opus.

"Well!" he said rather testily. "That is too bad."

"I know you'll be glad not to have me bothering you any more with my
lessons, and all."

"I will not say that."

He looked at Fifi closely, examined her face in a searching, personal
manner, which he had probably never before employed in reviewing a human
countenance.

"You don't look well--no, not in the least. You are not well. You are a
sick girl, and you ought to be in bed at this moment."

Fifi colored with pleasure. "No," she said, "I am not well."

Indeed Fifi was not well. Her cheek spoke of the three pounds she had
lost since he had first helped her with her difficulties, and the eleven
pounds before that. The hand upon the Turkey-red cloth was of such
transparent thinness that you were sure you could see the lamplight
shining through. Her eyes were startling, they were so full of
other-worldly sweetness and so ringed beneath with shadows.

"And if I stopped coming down here to work nights," queried Fifi
shamelessly, "would you--miss me?"

"Miss you?"

"You wouldn't--you wouldn't! You'd only be glad not to have me around--"

"I can truthfully say," said the little Doctor, glancing at his watch,
"that I am sorry you are prevented from graduating."

Fifi retired in a fit of coughing. She and her cough had played fast and
loose with Queed's great work that evening, and, moreover, it took him a
minute and a half to get her out of his mind after she had gone. Not
long afterwards, he discovered that the yellow sheet he wrote upon was
the last of his pad. That meant that he must count out time to go
upstairs and get another one.

Count out time! Why, that was what his whole life had come down to now!
What was it but a steady counting out of ever more and more time?

The thirty days of hours ceded to Klinker were up, and instead of at
once bringing the prodigal experiment to a close, Doctor Queed found
himse