iful each year. His salvation lay in keeping
on the grounds if he would hold his claim undisturbed.

Burgess had come to Kansas, he had told Fenneben, in order to know
something of the state where his only sister had lived. He did not know
yet all he wished to know about her life and death here. Her name was
never spoken in his father's presence after she came West, so great was
that father's anger over her leaving the East. And deep in Vincent's
mind he fixed the impression that his daughter had died as unreconciled
to her brother as to her father himself.

This was all his own business, however, and hidden deep, almost out of
sight of himself, was a selfish motive that had not yet put a visible
mark on the surface.

Burgess wanted to marry Norrie Wream, and he wanted her to have all the
good things of life which in her simple rearing had been denied her.
The heritage from his father's estate included certain trust funds
ambiguously bestowed by an eccentric English ancestor upon someone who
had come West not long before his death. These funds Vincent held by his
father's will--to which will Joshua Wream was witness--on condition that
no heir to these funds was living. If there were such person or persons
living--but Burgess knew there were none. Joshua Wream had made sure of
that for him before he left Cambridge. And yet it might be well to
stay in Kansas for a year or two--much better to settle any possible
difficulty here than to have anything follow him East later. For Burgess
had his eye on Dr. Wream's chair in Harvard when the old man should
give it up. That was a part of the contract between the two men, the old
doctor and the young professor. Until the night when Bond Saxon forced
him to take an unwilling oath, Burgess had had a comfortable conscience,
sure that his financial future was settled, and confident that this
assured him the hand of Elinor Wream when the time was ripe. With that
October night, however, a weight of anxiety began that increased with
the passing days. For as he grew nearer to the student life and took on
flesh and good will and a broader knowledge of the worth of humanity, so
he grew nearer to this smoothly hidden inner care. And, outside and in,
he wanted to stay in Kansas for the time.

In the weeks before the big ball game, Victor Burleigh seemed to have
forgotten the glen and the west bluff above the Kickapoo Corral. The
girls who would have substituted for Elinor in the afternoon