nd hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him
just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on
his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't
you?"

"Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had
begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was
to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank
showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things.

"It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of
yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I
don't understand."

"He is my father," said the Sophomore. This reason had seemed ample,
when he was thinking it over alone; it did not sound so convincing now.

"And suppose he is, do you have to pay for that? No, Jimmie, that's a
fine sentimental view of it that won't help either of you. Let him wait.
You have the right to do it. He can wait two years, till you've had your
chance. If it has been going on all this time, two years won't be long,
and then when you're through and ready to do something, there'll be
sense in it; there isn't now.--"

Just then Freshman Halleck, who had a genius for poking in where he was
not wanted, knocked and entered with Encina abruptness, for Frank had
not locked the door. He made his stay so long that Lyman, with his
thoughts on his unfinished work, said:

"Well, good-night, you fellows," as a gentle hint, and Jimmie withdrew.

The fog had not yet come into the valley when the Sophomore opened the
window, down in his own room; it was reaching out, still driven before a
lazy wind. Indistinctly the singing of the Glee Club, rolling home from
practice in the Quad, came through the damp twilight. Jimmie had been
with them on the Christmas trip, tasting a social life he had known
nothing of till then. Now they were going to run him for leader next
year. He sat on his window ledge listening. The side of the Hall
stretched away from him, four tiers of light where the fellows were at
work or were bumming away the week-night. Through the opened windows
came the low tone of many conversations, stirred now and then by a
"rough-house" note. A coyote barked somewhere among the hills, a
reminder of the nearness of our higher life to the life universal.
Jimmie took a long, deep breath of the moist air, as though he would
draw it all, all unto himself. This was his life, he had made it