ack 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 moment
outside to draw a deep, quivering breath, knocked, and being told to
come in, entered, closed the door behind him, and sat down white and
trembling in the nearest chair. About the middle of the room were
seated the professors of the Bible College and his pastor. They rose,
and calling him forward shook hands with him kindly, sorrowfully, and
pointed to a seat before them, resuming their own.

Before them, then, sat the lad, facing the wintry light; and there was
a long silence. Every one knew beforehand what the result would be. It
was the best part of a year since that first interview in the pastor's
study; there had been other interviews--with the pastor, with the
professors. They had done what they could to check him, to bring him
back. They had long been counsellors; now in duty they were
authorities, sitting to hear him finally to the end, that they might
pronounce sentence: that would be the severance of his connection with
the university and his expulsion from the ch