thout sugar or milk, the butterless toast! He told
it quite simply, utterly unaware, that he had told how he had made the
toast. They listened without comment as to one who had been set apart to
a duty undesirable but greatly to be admired. They listened as to one
who had passed through a great experience like being shut up in a mine
for days, or passing unharmed through a polar expedition or a lonely
desert wandering.

Afterward he spoke again about the child, telling briefly how he was
killed. He barely mentioned the sister, and he told nothing whatever of
his own part in it all. They looked at him curiously, as if they would
read between the lines, for they saw he was deeply stirred, but they
asked nothing. Presently they all fell to studying, Courtland with the
rest, for the morrow's work was important.

They made him stay on the couch and swung the light around where he
could see. They broke into song or jokes now and then as was their wont,
but over it all was a hush and a quiet sympathy that each one felt, and
none more deeply than Courtland. There had never been a time during his
college life when he had felt so keenly and so finely bound to his
companions as this night; when he went at last to his own room across
the hall, he looked about on its comforts and luxuries with a kind of
wonder that he had been selected for all this, while that poor woman
down in the tenement had to live with bare walls and not even a whole
candle! His pleasant room seemed so satisfying! And there was that girl
alone in her tiny room with so little about her to make life easy, and
her beautiful dead lying stricken before her eyes! He could not get away
from the thought of her when he lay down to rest, and in his dreams her
face of sorrow haunted him.

It was not until after the examinations the next afternoon that he
realized that he was going to her again; had been going all the time,
indeed! Of course he had been but a passing stranger, but she had no
one, and he could not let her be in need of a friend. Perhaps--Why, he
surely _had_ a responsibility for her when he was the only one who had
happened by and there was no one else!

She opened the door at his knock and he was startled by the look of her
face, so drawn and white, with great dark circles under her eyes. She
had not slept nor wept since he saw her, he felt sure. How long could
human frame endure like that? The strain was terrible for one so young
and frail. He found