too. I won't do a thing that'll ever keep you from showing up here in
Winthrop again."

On Monday morning after the exercises in the chapel, Mr. Phelps went to
Will's room and waited till the hour should pass and the eager-hearted
boy should return. As the great clock in the tower rang out the hour he
arose and stood in front of the window peering out across the campus at
the building where Will was at work, but the stroke had scarcely ceased
before he beheld the lad run swiftly down the steps and speed along the
pathway toward his room as if he were running for a prize. The
expression in the man's eyes was soft and there was also a suspicious
moisture in them as well as he watched his boy. Was it only a dream or
reality? Only a few short years ago and he had been an eager-hearted boy
speeding over the same pathway (he smiled as he thought how the "speed"
was never displayed on his way to the recitation building), and now it
was his own boy who was sharing in the life of old Winthrop and
doubtless he himself was in the minds of the young students relegated to
that remote and distant period when the "old grads" were supposed to be
young. Doubtless to them it was a time as remote as that when Homer's
heroes contended in battle or the fauns and satyrs peopled the wooded
hills and plains. And yet how vital it all was to him. He watched the
groups of students moving across the campus, and as the sound of their
shouts or laughter or the words of some song rose on the autumn air, it
seemed to the man that he needed only to close his eyes and the old life
would return--a life so like the present that it did not seem possible
that a great gulf of thirty years lay between.

Mr. Phelps' meditations were interrupted by the entrance of Will, who
burst into the room with the force of a small whirlwind.