duce
himself to touch his work again. And it dawned on him that his twenties
were slipping by and that he was becoming unsociable and grave. But
there seemed no remedy for the matter. His dream had become the most
vital part of his life, and would not let him lead a normal existence.
Such is the price that a dreamer pays for his vision.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW DAY

Roger, climbing the steps to the Science Building on the day that he was
thirty years old, wondered if his working life was to end as it had
begun within its ugly walls.

The building stood at the western edge of the campus. It was a Gothic,
Jacobean, Victorian composite, four stories high, built of yellow
sandstone, marble and brick. It boasted a round dome, rising from a
Gothic main roof and a little pagoda-like tower on each of the mansard
roofs that crowned the two wings. There had been a time when to Roger
the Science Building had been beautiful. But he saw its ugliness now and
laughed about it with Ernest.

On this December afternoon, Roger stayed late in the laboratory with
twenty seniors who for some weeks had been carrying on strength tests of
varying mixtures of concrete. The sun was low in the west and the
corners of the huge old room were dark. But a red glow from the west
window filled its center, turning the concrete briquettes piled on the
table in the middle of the room to gold.

Roger stood by the table, examining the students' reports on the
fractured briquettes. His black hair, with the sunset full upon it, was
like molten bronze. Roger's face had changed in the years since his
undergraduate days. His figure was the same, six feet of lean muscle;
his eyes were as blue and his face as thin and intellectual as when as a
small boy he had dreamed of an underground railway. But there had grown
subtly into his face a look of grimness and unhappiness that robbed it
of the youth it still should have retained.

A shock headed student came to the table with a briquette.

"How does the thesis go, Hallock?" asked Roger.

"Slow, just now, Mr. Moore."

"What's the trouble?"

"Oh, the best of the information is in German and I'm rotten at
scientific German."

"You've taken the required work in German, haven't you, Hallock?"

"Squeezed through by a hair's breadth," the boy answered with a grin.

Roger grunted. "Neglected it, of course, when you've been told time and
time again that a reading knowledge of scientific German is essenti