old it up against him.

"I went to night school all one winter in San Francisco with a fellow
named Stuart, another under dog like myself. We roomed together in a
hall-bedroom to save expense and ate fifteen-cent dinners together at the
same soup-house. He clerked in a little tobacco store daytimes. I was
running an express elevator. We both saved a little money above what it
cost to live. Things went on in this way for four months, until the end
of the winter term. One morning when I woke up I found he'd gone. I also
found that the little money I'd saved was gone. They went together. I
never saw either again.

"I had another friend once, I thought. It was after I'd decided to come
here to the university. I was harvesting on a wheat ranch in Nebraska,
making money to pay for my matriculation. He was a student too, he said,
from New York State, and working for the same purpose. We worked there
together all through harvest, boiled side by side in the same sun. One
day he announced a telegram from home. His mother was dying. He was crazy
almost because he hadn't nearly enough money to take him back at once.
And there his mother was in New York State dying! I lent him all I had
saved,--seventy odd dollars; and he gave me his note, insisted on doing
so--though he hoped the Lord would strike him dead if he failed to return
the loan within four days. I have that note yet. Perhaps the Lord did
strike him dead. I don't know.

"It was nearly September by this time and harvest was over, my job with
it, of course; so I started on east afoot, tramping it. I wasn't a
particularly handsome specimen, but still I was clean, and I never asked
for a meal without offering to work for it. Yet in the three hundred
miles I covered before school opened I had four farmers' wives call the
dog,--I recorded the number; and I only slept under a roof two nights.

"Even after I came here, after--Elice, don't! I'm a brute to have done
this! From the bottom of my soul I beg your pardon."

The girl was weeping repressedly, her face buried in her hands, her whole
body tense.

"Elice, please don't! I'm ashamed. I only wanted you to understand; and
now--I'm simply ashamed."

"You needn't be at all." As suddenly as it had come the storm abated,
under compulsion. "I wanted to know several things very much; and now I
think I do know them. At least I don't wonder any more--why." She stood
up decisively, disdaining to dry her eyes.

"But we mustn't sto