chancellor had told him curtly, cutting down unnecessary
expenses, for even in his anger Doctor Black was too
intelligent to hint at his real motive, and the professor was
far too innocent of evil, far too detached from college
politics to suspect. He would remain a professor emeritus on
half pay, but he no longer would teach. The college he had
served for thirty years-since it consisted of two brick
buildings and a faculty of ten young men--no longer needed
him. Even his ivy-covered cottage, in which his wife and he
had lived for twenty years, in which their one child had
died, would at the beginning of the next term be required of
him. But the college would allow him those six months in
which to "look round." So, just outside the circle of light
from his student lamp, he sat in his study, and stared with
unseeing eyes at the bust of Socrates. He was not considering
ways and means. They must be faced later. He was considering
how he could possibly break the blow to his wife. What
eviction from that house would mean to her no one but he
understood. Since the day their little girl had died, nothing
in the room that had been her playroom, bedroom, and nursery
had been altered, nothing had been touched. To his wife,
somewhere in the house that wonderful, God-given child was
still with them. Not as a memory but as a real and living
presence. When at night the professor and his wife sat at
either end of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he
would see her suddenly lift her head, alert and eager, as
though from the nursery floor a step had sounded, as though
from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her. And when
they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some
students' boarding-house, though they could take with them