And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the session
beginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew back from
this step; yet take any other, throw up the whole matter,--that he
could not do. With all his lifelong religious sense he held on to
the former realities, even while his grasp was loosening.

But this could not endure. University life as a Bible student and
candidate for the ministry, every day and many times every day,
required of him duties which he could not longer conscientiously
discharge; they forced from him expressions regarding his faith
which made it only too plain both to himself and to others how much
out of place he now was.

So the crisis came, as come it must.

Autumn had given place to winter, to the first snows, thawing
during the day, freezing at night. The roofs of the town were
partly brown, partly white; icicles hung lengthening from the
eaves. It was the date on which the university closed for the
Christmas holidays--Friday afternoon preceding. All day through the
college corridors, or along the snow-paths leading to the town,
there had been the glad noises of that wild riotous time: whistle
and song and shout and hurrying feet, gripping hands, good wishes,
and good-bys. One by one the sounds had grown fewer, fainter, and
had ceased; the college was left in emptiness and silence, except
in a single lecture room in one corner of the building, from the
windows of which you looked out across the town and toward the
west; there the scene took place.

It was at the door of this room that the lad, having paused a