A Master's Degree

CHAPTER VIII. LOSS, OR GAIN?

 We cannot make bargains for blisses,
     Nor catch them like fishes in nets,
 And sometimes the thing our life misses
     Helps more than the thing which it gets.
                         —CARY

ELINOR WREAM spent the holidays in the East and was two weeks late in entering school again. Then her Uncle Lloyd tightened the rules, exacting full measure for lost time, until she bewailed to her girl friends that she had no opportunity even to make fudge or wash her hair.

“Were you sorry to come back, then, Norrie?” her uncle asked one evening when they were alone in their library, and Elinor was lamenting her hard lot.

“No, I want to be with you, Uncle Lloyd.”

She was sitting on the arm of his morris chair, softly stroking his heavy hair away from his forehead.

“Looks like it, the way you hurried back,” Dr. Fenneben said, smiling.

“But Uncle Joshua is n't well, although, to be honest, he didn't seem a bit anxious to have me stay. He's so wrapped up in Sanscrit he has no time to live in the present. Why didn't he ever marry?”

“You have just said why,” her uncle answered her.

“Why did n't you ever marry. Were you ever in love?”

The library lamp cast only a shaded light over Lloyd Fenneben lounging comfortably in his chair. To a woman's eye he would have seemed the picture of an ideal husband.

“Yes, I was in love once. I did n't marry because—because—I didn't.”

“How romantic! Was it unrequited, or money, or what?” Norrie asked, eagerly.

“Or what,” he answered, and her finer sense made her change the subject.

“Say, Uncle Lloyd, Uncle Joshua says he wants me to marry.”

“What's he up to now? Tell me about it.”

Norrie was charming tonight in a dainty red evening gown that set off her pretty face, crowned with beautiful dark hair. Somehow the sight of her made deeper the void in Fenneben's life—since that love affair of his own long ago.

“Well,” Norrie went on, “Uncle says I'm to marry rich, because my papa expected me to. He said papa had money which was mamma's and he used it for college endowments, because the Wreams love colleges best, and that it was his wish, and it's Uncle Joshua's too, that I should marry well. I knew I came honestly by my love of spending. I inherited it from my mother. Aren't the Wreams all funny men to just see nothing in money, but a cap and gown and a Master's Degree? But you are a human being, Uncle Lloyd. You wouldn't leave a daughter dependent on her uncles and use her money to endow colleges, would you?” The white arm stole round his neck affectionately, as Elinor added softly, “I'm going to tell you something else. Uncle Joshua wants me to marry Professor Burgess.”

“Do you want to marry him?” Fenneben asked.

“He hasn't asked me to yet. But he is such a gentleman and he has a fortune in his own name, or in trust, or something like that. It would please the Cambridge folks, and Uncle Joshua expects me to consent, and I've never disobeyed uncle's wishes, so I couldn't refuse now. And, well, if he'll wait till I'm ready, I guess it will suit me.”

“He'll wait all right, if he wants you, Norrie. He must wait until you graduate,” the Dean declared.

“Oh, yes; a Wream without a college diploma is like a ship without a compass, a mere derelict on life's sea. I'm in no hurry anyhow,” and she began to talk of other things.

In the months that followed Trench had no need to watch Professor Burgess in his relation to Dennie Saxon, for Burgess had no thought of her other than of kindly sympathy. That is, Burgess thought he had no thought. He knew he was in love with Elinor, knew that back in Cambridge before he was graduated from the university. He had been told that Elinor liked luxurious living, and he had money—he had told Fenneben as much in their first interview. Everything seemed to be settled now, for Joshua Wream had written Burgess the kind of letter only a very old man, and an abstract scholar, and a bachelor would ever write, telling all that he had said to Norrie. He made it obligatory that Fenneben should first give his sanction to the union. He requested also that Burgess would never mention this letter to his dear young niece, and he expressly stipulated that Norrie should graduate at Sunrise first. He ended with an old man's blessing and with the assurance that with Elinor safely provided for his conscience (why his conscience?) would be at rest, and he could die in peace. So there was smooth sailing at Sunrise for many months. Elinor was always charming, and Dr. Fenneben seemed oblivious to the situation, least of all to putting up any objection, which, according to brother Joshua, would have blocked the game of love. There was time now for profound research, the study of types, seclusion, and the advantage of geographical breath which had brought the Professor to Kansas, and which he heeded less and less with the passing days. For he found himself more and more living in the lives of the students. He had been ashamed, once, of having been Dennie Saxon's escort; and he never knew when she came to be the one person in Lagonda Ledge to whom he turned for confidence and aid in many things.

Meanwhile the big boy from the western claim was as surely going up the rounds of culture as the Professor was coming down to the common needs of common minds, and both were unconscious then that back of each was Dr. Fenneben, “dear old Funnybone” to the student body, playing each man for his king row in the great game of life fought out in Sunrise-by-the-Walnut.

Toward Elinor, Victor Burleigh seemed utterly indifferent. Even Lloyd Fenneben, who had caught an insight into things on the night of the October storm, and had begun to read that new line in the boy's face, failed to grasp what lay back of those innocent-looking, wide-open eyes, whose tiger-golden gleam showed but rarely now. Vic was easily the most popular fellow in his class, and the year at Sunrise had worked a marvelous change in him.

“You are a darned smooth citizen,” Trench drawled, as he and Burleigh stood in the shade by the campus gate on the closing day of their freshman year.

A group of girls had been bidding the two good-bye for the summer. As Elinor Wream, who was the last one of the company, offered her hand to Vic there was a look of expectancy in her glance which found no response in his own eyes. As he turned away with indifferent courtesy to Trench, the big right guard stared hard at him.

“You are a—well, any kind of a smooth citizen, I say,” he repeated.

“What's troubling your liver now?” Vic asked.

Trench did not heed the question, but said, slowly: “And-the-big-noble- hearted-young-fellow-walked-in-and-out-beside-how-the-touch-of-her-hand- thrilled-his-every-pulse-beat,-and-how-her-smile-was-the-light-of-his- soul. And-he-grew-handsomer-and-more-beloved-with-the-passing-manhood—”

A sudden clutch on Trench's arm, the blaze of the old-time fury in burning eyes, as Vic's hoarse voice cried:

“For God's sake, Trench, get out of my sight!”

“I will,” drawled Trench. “The only friend you ever had. I'll carry my troubles up to Big Chief Funnybone. Like as not he'll sentence me to tumble you through the chapel door of the south turret down the 'road to perdition.' No use though, you go that road every day. Better treat me right and tell me all your troubles. If there is any cool handle to take hold of Gehanna by next to Funnybone, I'm the one fellow in Sunrise to grab onto it.”

But Vic was out of hearing.

And the days of a long, hot Kansas summer, a glorious autumn, and a short, nippy winter swung by in their appointed seasons. And now the springtime was unrolling in dainty beauty of tender green leaf, and growing grass, and warm, sweet air, and trill of song bird. College students philosophize little in the springtime of their sophomore year. Having learned all that books can teach, and a little more, they seek other pastime. Nobody in Sunrise except Dr. Fenneben took the time to remember how stiff and ungenial Professor Burgess was when he first came West; nor what an awkward gosling Victor Burleigh was the day he entered Sunrise; nor that once it could have seemed just a little odd to invite Dennie Saxon, a poor student, daughter of a half-reformed drunkard, to the class parties; nor that even Elinor Wream, “Norrie the beloved,” was not supposed to be engaged to Vincent Burgess. Supposed! And that, when her senior year was well along, the engagement would be openly spoken of as now in her sophomore year, it was quietly accepted, even if Professor Burgess was often Dennie Saxon's escort. That was because he was such a gentleman. Nor that with all these changes Trench had remained the same old lazy Trench, the comfortable idol of the girls, for he was right guard to all of them, and cared for none. And they never knew till afterward that for all the four years he was faithful to a little sweetheart out in the sandy Cimarron River country, to whom he took back clean hands and a pure heart, when he went home after four years of college life.

None of these things were noted especially, save by Dr. Lloyd Fenneben, and he wasn't a sophomore nor a professor in love with a pretty girl; a professor learning for the first time that sympathy has also its culture value, as well as perfectly translated Horace, and that the growth of a human soul means something as beautiful as the growth of a complete conjugation on an old Greek stem from an older Greek root. Fenneben had learned all this while he was chasing about the Kansas prairies with a college in his vest pocket.

There were some unchanged things, however, which Fenneben only guessed at. Victor Burleigh had never apologized to Professor Burgess for his rude attack, unless a certain strained dignified courtesy be the mark of a tacit apology. And Burgess could give only cold recognition to the big fellow who had choked him into submission and had gone unpunished by the college authorities.

Between these two Fenneben guessed there was no change. But he did not grieve deeply. There must be a personal phase in this grudge that no third person could handle. It might be a girl—but the face of the returns indicated otherwise. Meanwhile the college was doing its perfect work for Burleigh, whose strength of mind, and self-control, and growing graciousness of manner betokened the splendid manhood that should rest on this foundation. While the spirit of the prairie sod, the benediction of the broad-sweeping air of heaven, and the sturdy, wholesome life of the sons and daughters of freedom-loving, broad-spirited men and women—all were giving to Vincent Burgess a new happiness in his work unlike any pleasure he had ever known before.

Little Bug Buler, now four years of age, had changed least of all among changing things about Lagonda Ledge. A sweet-faced, quaint little fellow he was, with big appealing eyes, a baby lisp to his words, and innocent ways. He was a sturdy, pudgy, self-reliant youngster, however, who took long rambles alone and turned up safe at the right moment. All Lagonda Ledge petted him, even to Burgess, who never forgot the day in the rotunda when Bug's pitying voice had broken Burleigh's grip on his neck.

Bond Saxon had not changed, nor the white-haired woman of Pigeon Place—nor the reputation of the ravines and rocky coverts for hiding law breakers across the Walnut River. And Fenneben noted often the slender blue smoke rising where nobody had a house.

It was an April day in the Walnut Valley, with all the freshness of the earth just washed and perfumed by April showers. The sunshine was pale gold. There was a gray-green filmy light from budding trees, and the old-time miracle of the grass was wrought out once more before the eyes of men. The orchards along the Walnut were faintly pink, and the eggs in the robin's nest, the south winds purring through the wooded spaces, the odor of far-plowed furrows on the prairie farms, all gave assurance of the year's gladdest days. From the Sunrise ledge the beauty of the landscape was exquisite. There was no haze overhanging the earth now, and the Walnut Valley was a picture beyond a Master's dream. Victor Burleigh sat on the top of the flight of steps leading from the lower campus, looking lazily out with dreamy eyes on all that the earth had to give on this sweet April afternoon.

Presently Elinor Wream came around the north angle of the building, hesitated a little, then walked straight to the steps.

“Good afternoon, Victor,” she said.

Burleigh looked up, glad then of his months of discipline and self-control. A sight good for anybody on a day like this was this college girl with beautiful dark hair and laughing dark eyes, a satiny pink and white complexion, and a slender form, clad just now in dainty pink gingham with faint little edgings of white and pale green, all stylishly put together to reveal rounded arms, and white neck, and dimpled chin.

“Hello, Elinor,” Vic said, calmly, making room for her on the stone steps. “Take a seat.”

Elinor sat down beside him, throwing her hat on the ground.

“Whither away?” Vic asked.

“I'll tell you presently. I want to get over my stage fright first.”

“All right, look at this view. I'll give it to you if you like it.” Vic had turned to the west again and was looking away toward the dreamy prairies beyond the valley.

Elinor recalled the September day when the bull snake lay sunning itself on this very stone. How shy and awkward he seemed then, with only a deep sweet voice to attract favorable attention. And now, big, and graceful, and handsome, and reserved—any girl might be proud to have his regard. Of course, for herself, there was Vincent Burgess in the pleasant inevitable sometime. She gave little thought to that. She was living in the present. And in the wooing spirit of the April afternoon Elinor was glad to sit here beside Victor Burleigh.

“What time next month do we have the big baseball game?” she asked. “The game that is to make Sunrise the champion college in Kansas, and you our college champion?” Vic's lips suddenly grew gray.

“Friday, the thirteenth—auspicious date!” he answered. “But I may not play in it. I might fail.”

“Oh, we must win this game, anyhow, and you never do fail. Don't forget the name your mother gave you. Do you remember when you told me that?”

“A couple of thousand years ago, wasn't it?” Vic asked, smiling down on her. “If I don't play Sunrise needn't fail, even for Friday, the thirteenth.”

“But it will fail without you. You pulled us to victory a year ago at the Thanksgiving game, and last fall the Sunrise goal line wasn't crossed the whole season with 'Burleigh! Burly! Burlee!' for a slogan. We must win this year. Then it will be a complete championship: football, basket-ball, and baseball. We won't do it though unless we have 'Burleigh at the bat'.”

A shadow crossed his face and he looked away to where a tiny film of blue smoke was rising above the rough ledges beyond the river.

“I'm getting over my stage fright now,” Elinor said, the pink deepening on her fair cheek, “and I'll tell you what I want.”

“Command me!” he said, gallantly.

“Well, it's awful, and the girls are too mean to live. But they are getting even with me, they say, for something I did last fall.”

“All right.” Vic was waiting, graciously.

“A lot of us have broken some of the rules of the Sorority and it's decreed that I must go over the route we came home by on the night of the storm down in the Kickapoo Corral. They are having a 'spread' down there at five o'clock and we are to get there in time for it, going by the west side of the river, and they'll bring us home. They said I should ask you to go with me, and if you would n't go for me to ask Mr. Trench to go. They are too silly for anything.”

“Trench was executed for manslaughter at two forty-five today. It's three o'clock now. Let's go.” He lifted her to her feet and stooped to pick up her hat.

“Do you really mind going with me, Victor?” Elinor asked.

“Do I mind? I've been waiting two years for you to ask me to go.” His voice was very deep and there was a soft light in his brown eyes.

Elinor's pulse beat felt a thrill. A sudden sense of the sweetness of the day and of a joy unlike any other joy of her life possessed her.

Down on the bridge they stopped to watch the sunlit waters of the Walnut rippling below them.

“Are we the same two who crept up on this bridge, wet, and muddy and tired, and scared one stormy October night eighteen months ago?” Elinor asked.

“I've had no reincarnation that I know of,” Vic replied.

“I have,” Elinor declared, and Vic thought of Burgess.

Up the narrow hidden glen they made their way, clambering about broken ledges, crossing and recrossing the little stream, hugging the dry footing under overhanging rock shelves, laughing at missteps and rejoicing in the springtime joy, until they came suddenly upon a grassy open space, cliff-walled and hidden, even from the rest of the glen. At the farther end was the low doorway-like entrance to the cave. The song-birds were twittering in the trees above them, the waters of the little stream gurgled at their feet, the woodsy odor of growing things was in the air, and all the little glen was restful and quiet.

“Isn't it beautiful and romantic—and everything nice?” Elinor cried. “I don't mind this sentence to hard service. It is worth it. Do you mind the loss of time, Victor?”

“I counted it gain to be here with you, even in the storm and terror. How can this be loss?” he answered her. His voice was low and musical.

Elinor looked up quickly. And quickly as the thing had come to Victor Burleigh on the west bluff above the old Kickapoo Corral two Octobers ago, so to Elinor Wream came the vision of what the love of such a man would be to the woman who could win it.

“Do you really mean it, Victor? Was n't I a lump of lead? A dead weight to your strength that night? You have never once spoken of it.”

She looked up with shining eyes and put out her hand. What could he do but keep it in his own for a moment, firm-held, as something he would keep forever.

“I have never once forgotten it,” he murmured.

The cave by daylight was as the lightning had shown it, a big chamber, rock-walled, rock-floored, rock-roofed, in the side of the bluff, but little below the level of the ground and easy of entrance. It was cool and damp, but, with the daylight through the doorway, it was merely shadowy inside. In the farther wall yawned the ragged opening to the black spaces leading off underground. Through this opening these two had crept once, feeling that behind the wall somebody was crouching with evil intent. They peered through the opening now, trying to see the miraculous way by which they had come into the cave from the rear. But they stared only into blackness and caught the breath of the damp underground air with a faint odor of wood smoke somewhere.

“Elinor, it's a good thing we came through here in the night. It would have been maddening to be forced in here by daylight. We must have slipped down through a hole somewhere in our stumbles and hit a passage leading out of here only to the river, a sort of fire escape by way of the waters. You remember we couldn't get anywhere on the back track, except to the cliff above the Walnut. It's all very fine if the escaper gets out of the river before he reaches Lagonda's whirlpool.”

He was leaning far through the opening in the wall, gazing into the darkness and seeing nothing.

“Somewhere back in there, while I was pawing around that night, I found something up in a chink that felt like the odd-shaped little silver pitcher my mother had once—an old family heirloom, lost or stolen some time ago. I came back and hunted for it later, but it was winter time and cold as the grave outside and darker in here, and I couldn't find anything, so I concluded maybe I was mistaken altogether about its being like that old pitcher of ours. It was a bad night for 'seein' things'; it might have been for 'feelin' things' as well. There's nothing here but damp air and darkness.”

And even while he was speaking close beside the wall, so near that a hand could have reached him, a man was crouching; the same man whose cruel eyes had stared through the bushes at Lloyd Fenneben as he sat by the river before Pigeon Place; the same man whose eyes had leered at Vic Burleigh in this same place eighteen months before; the same man whom little Bug Buler's innocent face had startled as he was about to seize the money box at the gateway to the Sunrise football field; and this same man was crouching now to spring at Vic Burleigh's throat in the darkness.

“It's a good thing a fellow has a guardian angel once in a while,” Vic said, as he hastily withdrew his head and shoulders. “We get pretty close to the edge of things sometimes and never know how near we are to destruction.”

“We were pretty close that night,” Elinor replied.

“Shall we rest here a little while, or do your savage sorority sisters require you to do time in so many minutes?” Vic asked, as they left the cave and came again into the sunlight, and all the sweetness of the April woodland, and the rugged beauty of the glen.

“I'm glad to rest,” Elinor said, dropping down on a stone. Her cheeks were blooming from the exercise of the tramp, and her pretty hair was in disorder.

Far away from the west prairie came the faint note of a child's voice in song.

“Victor,” Elinor said, as they listened, “do you know that the Sunrise girls envy Bug Buler? They say you would have more time for the girls if it wasn't for him. What you spend for him you could spend on light refreshments for them, don't you see?”

“I know I'm a stingy cuss,” Vic said, carelessly, but a deeper red touched his cheek.

“You know you are not,” Elinor insisted, “and I've always thought it was a beautiful thing for a big grown man like you to care for a little orphan boy. All the girls think so, too.”

Burleigh looked down at her gratefully.

“I thought once—in fact, I was told once—that my care for him was sufficient reason why I should let all the girls alone, most of all why I should not think of Elinor Wream.”

“How strange!” Elinor's face had a womanly expression. “I've never had a little child to love me. I've been brought up with only AEneas's small son Ascanius, and other classical children, on Uncle Joshua's Dead Language book shelves. I feel sometimes as if I'd been robbed.”

“You? I didn't know you had ever wanted anything you did n't get.”

Victor had thought all things were due to her and came as duly. The womanly look on her face now was a revelation to him. But then he had not dared to study her face for months, and he did not yet realize what life in Dr. Fenneben's home must mean to her character-building.

“I'll tell you some time about something I ought to have had, a sacrifice I was forced to make; but not now, Tell me about Bug.”

There was no bitterness in Elinor's tone, yet the idea of her having the capacity to endure gave her a newer charm to the man beside her.

“I have never known whose child Bug is,” he began. “The way in which he came to me is full of terrible memories, and it all happened on the blackest day of my life—the hard life of a lonely boy on a Kansas claim. That's why I never speak of it and try always to forget it. I found him by mere accident, helpless and in awful danger. He was about two years old then and all he could say was 'bad man' and his name, 'Bug Buler.' I've wondered if Bug is his name, or if he could not speak his real name plainly then.”

Burleigh paused, and a sense of Elinor's interest brought a thrill of joy to him.

“Where was he?” she asked.

Vic slowly unfastened his cuff and slipped his coat sleeve up to his elbow.

“Do you remember that scar?” he asked. “It is not the only one I have. I fought with death for that baby boy and I shall always carry the scars of that day. Bug was alone in a lonely little deserted dugout. Somebody had left him there to perish. He was on a low chair, the only furniture in the room, and on the earth floor between him and me were five of the ugliest rattlesnakes that ever coiled for a deadly blow. Little Bug held out his arms to me, and I'll never forget his baby face—and—I killed them all and carried him away. It was a dangerous, hard job, but the boy I saved has been the blessing of my life ever since. I could not have endured the days that followed without his need for care and his love and innocence. He's kept me good, Elinor. When I got back home with him my mother, who had been very sick, was dead, and our house had been robbed of every valuable by some thief—a wayside tragedy of western Kansas. That was the day the pitcher was stolen. A note was left warning me not to follow nor try to find out who had done the stealing, but I thought I knew anyhow. That's why I killed that bull snake the first day I came to Sunrise and that's why I must have looked like a bulldog to you, soft-sheltered Cambridge folks. Life has been mostly a fist fight for me, but Dr. Fenneben has taught me that there are other powers beside physical strength. That the knock-down game doesn't bring the real victory always. I hope I've learned a little here.”

A little! Could this be the big awkward freshman of a September day gone by? Then college culture is surely worth the cost.

Elinor leaned forward, eagerly.

“Tell me about your father,” she said.

“My father lost his life because he dared to tell the truth,” Victor replied.

“Oh, glorious!” Elinor cried, earnestly.

“I have always loved my father's memory for his courage,” Victor continued. “He was a believer in law enforcement and he was a terror to the bootleggers who carried whisky into our settlement. A man named Gresh was notorious for selling whisky to the claim holders. He gave it, Elinor, gave it, to a boy, a widow's son, made him drunk, robbed him, and left him to freeze to death in a blizzard. The boy lived long enough to tell my father who did it, and it was his testimony that helped to convict Gresh and start him to the penitentiary. He escaped from the sheriff on the way—and, so far as I know, there's one bad man still at large, a fugitive before the law. Whisky is the devil's own best tool, whether a man drinks it himself or gets other people to drink it.”

“That's a bad name,” Elinor said. “My grandfather adopted a boy named Gresh, who turned out bad. I think he was killed in a saloon row in Chicago. Did this Gresh ever trouble you again?”

Burleigh's face was grim as he answered:

“My father was waylaid and murdered with a club by this man. He escaped afterward into Indian Territory. He left his own name, Gresh, scrawled on a piece of paper pinned to my father's coat to show whose revenge was worked out. He was a volcano of human hate—that man Gresh. After my father's name was written—'The same club for every Burleigh who ever crosses my path.' I expect to cross his path some day, and if I ever lay my eyes on that fiend it will go hard with one of us.” The yellow glow burned again in Victor Burleigh's eyes and his fists clinched involuntarily. They were silent a while, until the sweetness of the day and the joy of being together wooed them to happier thoughts. Then Elinor remembered her disordered hair and, throwing aside her hat, she deftly put it into place.

“Am I presentable for the supper at the Kickapoo Corral?” she asked, as she picked up her hat again.

“You suit me,” Burleigh replied. “What are the Kickapoo requirements?”

“That Victor Burleigh shall be satisfied,” she answered, roguishly. “Really, that's right. Four girls offered to substitute for me in this penitential pilgrimage and write some long translations for me beside.”

“Four, individually or collectively?” he asked.

“Either way,” she answered.

“Why did n't you let them do it?

“Which way?”

“Either way,” he replied.

“Would you rather have had the four either way, than me?” she questioned, with pretty vanity.

“Much rather.” His voice was stern.

“Why?” She was stung by the answer.

The glen was all a dreamy gray-green ruggedness of shelving rock with mossy crevices and ferny nooks. The sunlight filtering through the young leaves fell about them in a shadow-flecked softness. There was a crooning song of some bird on its nest, the murmur of waters rippling down the stony shallows, and a beautiful girl in a dainty pink dress with her fingers just touching her fluffy masses of hair.

“Why?”

With the question Elinor looked up and saw why. Saw in Victor Burleigh's golden-brown eyes a look she had never read in eyes before; saw the whole face, the rugged, manly face lighted with a man's overmastering love. And the joy of it thrilled her soul.

“Do you know why?”

He leaned toward her ever so little. And Elinor Wream, forgetful of the Wream family rank, forgetful of her tacit consent to Uncle Joshua's wishes, forgetful of Vincent Burgess and his heritage of culture, beautiful Elinor Wream, with her starry eyes, and cheeks of peach-blossom pink, put out her hands to Victor Burleigh, who took them eagerly.

“Let me hold them a minute,” he said, softly. “There are sixty years to remember, but only one hour like this.”

Then, forgetful of the world and the demands of the world, keeping her hands in his, he bent and kissed her, as from the foundation of the world it was his right to do. And Love's Young Dream, not bought with pain, as mother love is bought, nor wrought out with prayer and sacrificial service, as love for all humanity is won, came again on this April day to the little, rock-sheltered glen beside the bright waters of the Walnut, and briefly there rebuilt in rainbow hues the old, old paradise of joy for these two alone.

And into the new Eden came the new serpent also for to destroy. Before Elinor and Victor was the sunlit valley. Behind them was the cave's mouth with its shadowy gloom deepening back to dense darkness. And creeping stealthily through that blackness, like a serpent warming its venom and writhing slowly toward the light, a human form was slowly, stealthily crawling outward, with head upreared and cruel eyes alert. The brutal face was void of pity, as if the conscience behind it had long been bound and gagged to human sympathy.

While Burleigh was speaking the caveman had reached the doorway and reared up just beside it in the shadow. Clutching a brutal-looking club in his hairy, rough hand, he stood listening to the story of the murder that had left Victor fatherless. The face of the listener made clear the need for guardian angels. One leap, one blow, and Victor Burleigh would carry only one more scar to his grave.

Suddenly a faint piping voice floated in upon the glen:

 Little childwen pwessing near
     To the feet of Thwist, the Ting,
 Have you neiver doubt nor fear
     Or some twibute do you bwing?

And Bug Buler, flushed and splashed, and generally muddy and happy, came around the fallen ledges and debauched into the grassy sunshiny space before the cavern. Only a tiny, tumbled-up, joyous child, with no power in his pudgy little arm; and Victor Burleigh, tall, muscular and agile. Against this man of tremendous strength the caveman's club was lifted. But with the sound of the child's voice and the sight of the innocent face the club fell harmless. A look of fright, deepening to a maniac's terror, seized the creature, and noiselessly and swiftly as a serpent would escape he crawled back into the darkness and burrowed deep from the eyes of men. So strength that day was ruled by weakness.

“I ist followed you, Vic,” Bug said, clutching Vic's hand.

“This is n't a safe place to come, Bug. You must n't follow me here.”

“Nen you must n't go into is n't safe places, so I won't follow. Little folks don't know,” Bug said, with cunning gravity.

“He is right,” Elinor said. “I think we'd better leave now.”

They knew that henceforth this spot would be holy ground for them, but they did not dare to think further than that. They only wished that the moments would stay, that the sun would loiter slowly down the afternoon sky.

“I know a way out,” Bug declared. Turn, “I'll show you.”

Then, with a child's sense of direction, he led away from the cave out to where the deep ravine headed in a rough mass of broken rock.

“Tlimb up that and you're out,” Bug declared.

They climbed up to the high level prairie that sweeps westward from the Walnut bluffs.

“Doodby, folks. I want to Botany wiv urn over there. I turn wiv Limpy out here.”

Bug pointed to a group of students wandering about in search of dogtooth violets and other botanical plunder from Nature's springtime treasury. Among the group was Bug's chum, the crippled student.

“Well, stay with them this time, you little wandering Jew,” Vic admonished, nor dreamed how his guardian angel had come to him this day in the guise of this same little wanderer.

When Victor and Elinor had come at last to the west bluff above the Walnut River, the late afternoon was already casting long shadows across the grassy level of the old Kickapoo Corral. And again the camp fires were glowing where a Sorority “spread” was merrily in the making.

They must go down soon and join in the hilarity. But a golden half hour yet hung in the west—and the going down meant the going back to all that had been.

“Look at the foam on the whirlpool, Elinor. See how deliberately it swings upstream. Isn't that a most deceiving bit of treachery?” Vic said as he watched the river.

Elinor looked thoughtfully at the slow-moving water.

“I cannot endure deceit,” she said at last. “I like honesty in everything. I said I would tell you sometime about a sacrifice I was forced to make. I'll tell you now if you will not speak of what I say.”

How delicious to have her confidence in anything. Vic smiled assent.

“My father had a fortune from my mother. When he died he left me to the care of my two uncles, and gave all his money to endow chairs in universities. He thought a woman could marry money, and that he was doing mankind a service in this endowment. Maybe he was, but I've always rebelled against being dependent. I've always wanted my own. Uncle Joshua thinks I am frivolous, and he has told Uncle Lloyd that it's just my love of spending and extravagant notions that makes me rebel against conditions. It is n't. It's the sense of being robbed, as it were. It was n't right and honest toward me, even in a great cause, to leave me dependent. Uncle Lloyd would never have done it. I hope he does n't think I'm as bad as Uncle Joshua does. You won't mind my telling you this, nor think me ungrateful to my relatives for their care of me. Nobody quite understands me but you.”

The time had come for them to join the jolly picnic crowd in the Corral. She would go back to Vincent Burgess in a little while, and this glorious day would be only a memory. And yet, down in the pretty glen, Victor had held her hands and kissed her red lips. And she had been glad down there. The void in his life seemed blacker than the blackness behind the cavern.

“Elinor,” he asked, suddenly, “are you bound by any promise—has Professor Burgess—?” He hesitated.

“No,” she answered, turning her face away.

“Pardon my rudeness. You know I am not well-bred,” he said, gently.

“Victor Burleigh, you ill-bred, of all the gentle, manly fellows in Sunrise! You know you are not.”

A great hope leaped to life now, as Vic recalled the query, “If Victor Burleigh had his corners knocked off and was sandpapered down and had money?”—and of Elinor's blushing confession that it would make a difference she could not help if these things were. The corners were knocked off now, and Dean Fenneben had gently but persistently applied the sandpaper. The money must be henceforth the one condition.

“Elinor.” Vic's voice was sweet as low bars of music.

“Oh, Victor, there's something I can't prevent.”

She was thinking of Uncle Joshua, whose money had supported her all these years and of her obligation to heed his wishes. It was all settled for her now. And all the while Victor was thinking of his own limited means as the rock that was wrecking him with her.

For all his life afterward he never forgot the sorrow of that moment. He looked into Elinor's face, and all the longing, all the heart-hunger of the days gone by, and of the days to come seemed to lie in those wide-open eyes shaded by long black lashes.

“Elinor, my father's cruel murder and my mother dying alone were one kind of grief. My fight with those deadly poison things to rescue little Bug was another kind. My days of hardship and poverty on the claim, with only Bug and me in that desolate loneliness, was still another. But none of these seem a sorrow beside what I must face henceforth. And yet I have one joy mine now. You did care down in the glen. May I keep that one gracious joy—mine always?”

“You have always won in every game. You will in this struggle. Don't forget the name your mother gave you.” Her eyes were luminous with tears. “We must go down to the Corral now. Tomorrow will make things all right. I shall be proud of you and your success everywhere, for you will succeed.”

“I may not be worthy of victory,” he said, sadly.

“You have never been unworthy. Don't be now.” She smiled bravely.

They turned from the west prairie and the sunset, and slowly they passed out of its passing radiance down to the darkening spaces of the old Kickapoo Corral.

And the day with its gladness and sorrow, whether for loss or gain, slipped into the shadowy beauty of an April twilight.