. By the time he entered college this
sense had assumed exaggerated proportions, and he had reached a point
where he was looking for injustices, and was quick to resent them. He
might have made a place for himself in athletics had he not expected
some one else to take the initiative; he might have made friends except
that he waited to be sought out. When he saw other fellows around him
succeed where he had failed, the sensitiveness of his nature placed his
classmates on trial, appointed himself judge, and condemned them as
guilty of injustice, the most heinous crime in the category of sin. As a
penalty, he had banished them from his life. The fact that they bore
their punishment with seeming indifference served only to twist the
knife in the wound.

His devotion to Marian Seymour gave his strange nature its only outlet.
Her father and his had been bosom friends in boyhood, and they had hoped
to see their children bound together in even closer ties. The tense,
deep nature of the boy dominated,--even more so after he went to college
and she to school, and they saw less of each other. He was different
from other boys she knew, and at first it pleased her vanity that he had
no thought for any one else, even though he demanded so much of her.
Then she became fairly terrified by his intensity, and when she broke
the engagement, just after his graduation, she welcomed her release.

Her engagement and marriage to Thatcher supplied the final evidence that
the whole world was built upon a structure of injustice, and Hamlen fled
from it with a sense of leaving behind a thing despised. During all
these years the judge had worn his ermine, and the world represented the
condemned prisoner, working out its sentence, but somehow failing to
gain salutary results from its long chastisement. Now a belated witness
appears, supplying testimony which shakes the integrity of the judicial
decision. Huntington presents the case from a position new to the
self-appointed judge, and Hamlen had spent many hours since that
eventful meeting wondering whether the world had really been on trial
or he himself. Many of the words which Marian had spoken, which had not
made their impression when he first heard them came back with redoubled
force after Huntington had added his testimony to hers. "Was it their
failure to understand you or your failure to give them the opportunity?"
she asked. "The citizens of the college world are young, untried boys,"
Hunt