enture to assume that I have the
pleasure of making you acquainted with Mr. Leigh, our new professor of
mathematics."

His words were distinctly spoken, but pitched in so low a tone that
they produced an odd effect, as of purring.

It was now that Leigh discovered his mistake. The man whom he had
taken for the president was Bishop Wycliffe, and it required but five
minutes of conversation to show him that the bishop, not the president,
was the significant personality.

Doctor Renshaw might have been anywhere in the afternoon of life, and
one felt instinctively that his sunset had antedated his meridian. He
was like those ancients, spoken of with such disapproval by Cicero, who
began to be old men early that they might continue to be old men for a
long time. His value to the institution he had served so long, and his
safety in his position, lay in the possession of negative qualities.
His silence was interpreted as an indication of wisdom, and the firmly
cut features of his inscrutable face would have served an artist as a
personification of discipline. As he exchanged the conventional
greetings the occasion demanded, he might even then have been standing
for the portrait of himself that was one day to be added to those of
his predecessors on the library wall; or he might have been one of the
portraits already there that had stepped from its frame for a moment to
take the newcomer by the hand.

In short, the thing of greatest significance in this meeting, the thing
which made itself felt by all three participants, was the juxtaposition
of the ancient and modern. The young man, clothed in a light grey
suit, his soft hat crushed in the nervous grasp of his long fingers, a
man whose scholastic training had been disassociated from religious
traditions, now stood face to face with mediaevalism, with two elderly
men in dark habiliments, as greatly superior to himself in that
subtlety which finds its highest expression in the ecclesiastical type
as he was superior to them in the acquisition of scientific truth.

Presently the bishop invited his young friend, as he already called the
new arrival, to walk with him about the grounds. Doctor Renshaw, left
alone, resumed his seat in the heavy oaken chair which had once
belonged to the founder of blessed memory, his shining head round as a
ball against the diamonded panes at his back, the framed plans of the
St. George's Hall of the future looking down upon him. On the br