day, for he would be busy, and she had
engagements Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday. He had not noticed
the subtle withdrawing as she told him, the quick, furtive calculation
in her glance. She knew how to make coming to her a privilege. Just
because she had let him think he saw a bit of her heart that night, she
meant to hold him off. Not too long, for he was not sufficiently bound
to her to be safe from forgetting, but just long enough to whet his
eagerness. Her former experience in such matters had taught her to
expect that he would probably call her up and beg to see her sooner,
when she might relent if he was humble enough. And she had not misjudged
him. He was looking forward to Thursday as a bright, particular goal,
planning what he would say to her, wondering if his heart would bound as
it had when she looked at him Sunday night, and if the strange sweetness
that seemed about to be settling upon him would last.

Before he left his room that morning he did something he had never done
before in college; he locked his door and knelt beside his bed to pray,
with a strong, sweet sense of the Presence standing beside him, and
breathing power into his soul.

He had not much to ask for himself. He simply craved that Presence, and
it had never seemed so close. As he unlocked his door and hurried down
the hall to the dining-room he marveled that a thing so sweet had been
so long neglected from his life. Prayer! How he had sneered at it! Yet
it was a reasonable thing, after all, now that he had come believing.

Nurse Wright was on hand promptly at the place appointed. She was armed
with a list of written instructions. They went to work at once, setting
aside the things to be sold; folding and packing the scanty wardrobe,
and putting by themselves the clothes and things that had belonged to
little Aleck. One incident brought tears to their eyes. In moving out
the trunk a large pasteboard box fell down, and the contents dropped
upon the floor. The nurse stooped to pick up the things, some pieces of
an old overcoat of fine, dark-blue material, cut into small garments,
basted, ready to be sewed; a tissue-paper pattern in a printed envelope
marked "Boy's suit." Courtland lifted up the cover to put it on again,
and there they saw, in a child's stiff little printing letters, the
inscription, "Aleck's new Sunday suit," and underneath, like a subtitle,
in smaller letters, "Made out of father's best overcoat."

"Poor little