knew my son at college?" said the mother.

"I knew him well, Mrs. McKinney. He was my dearest friend."

The old lady began to cry softly.

"I am so sorry," she said, "that he failed in his examinations, and
yet, I ought to be glad, I suppose, for it is a comfort to have him.
Ellie is a cripple and without Alec what would we do? Of course, if
he hadn't failed, I couldn't hope to keep him, so it is better,
perhaps, as it is. But he was such a smart boy and so anxious to get
on. It was a great disappointment to him; and then, of course, none of
us liked to have the neighbors know that the boy was not cut out for
something better than a farmer. But you must have liked him, when you
came all the way from New York to see him."

I began to understand.

That night I thought it all out in my little room, with the flies
buzzing around me and the four big posts standing guard over a feather
bed, into which I sank and disappeared. I was prepared to face Mac in
the morning.

He had already done a good day's work in the fields, before I was up
for breakfast, so we went into the garden to thresh it out.

"Mac," I said severely, "did you tell your mother and sister and the
people around here that you had failed in your examinations?"

"Well, Bruce," he said haltingly, "I did not exactly tell them that,
but I let them think it."

"Good Lord!" I thought, "the man who easily led the whole college."
But aloud: "Did you tell them you had no career open to you in New
York?"

"Well, Bruce, I had to let them think that, too."

"And you did not tell them, Mac, of the traveling scholarship you won,
or the offers that Yale made you?"

"Oh, what was the use, Bruce?" said Mac desperately. "I know it was
wrong, but it was the only way I saw. Look here. When I got back home,
with all these letters after my name and that traveling scholarship to
my credit, I found sister as I told you she was--you'll see her
yourself this morning, poor girl--and mother blind. Brother, the best
brother that ever lived--it is his picture they have in that hideous
frame in the front room--died two months before I graduated. Bruce,
there was no one but me. If I had told the truth, they would not have
let me stay. They would have starved first. Why, Bruce, sister never
wore a decent dress or a decent hat, and mother never had that thing
that every old lady on the Island prizes, a silk dress, just because
she saved the money for me. I told you that these peo