for
you to remain at Saint Werner's at present, until you have mended your
ways, and taken a different view of the duties and responsibilities of
college life. You are rusticated for a year. You must leave
to-morrow."

Kennedy bowed and left the room. He, too, had been coming to a
decision, and one that rendered all minor ones a matter of no
consequence to him. During all the wet, and feverish, and sleepless
night he had been determining what to do, and the event of this morning
confirmed him still further. He was rusticated for a year; where could
he go? Not to his father and his home, where every eye would look on
him as a disgraced and characterless man; not to any of his relations or
friends, who would regard him perhaps as a shame and burden;--no, there
was but one home for him, and that was the long home, undisturbed
beneath the covering of the grave.

The burden and mystery of life lay heavily on him--its lasting
calamities and vanishing joys, its trials and disappointments. He would
try whether, in a new state of life, the same distorted individuality
was a necessary possession. Would it be necessary there also to live
two lives in one, to have a soul, within whose precincts curse wrestled
with blessing, good with evil, and life with death? As life went with
him then, he would rather escape from it even into annihilation; he
groaned under it, and in spite of all he had heard or read, he had no
fear whatever of the after-death. If he had _any_ feeling about _that_,
it was a feeling of curiosity alone. He could not wholly condemn
himself: he felt that however much evil might have mastered him good was
the truest and most distinctive element of his being. He loved it even
when he abandoned it, and yielded himself to sin. He could not believe
that for these frailties, he would be driven into an existence of
unmitigated pain.

He had no fear, no shadow of fear of the state of death, for he forgot
that he would carry himself, his unchanged being--Conscience, Habit and
Memory--into the other world. What he dreaded was the spasm of dying--
the convulsion that was to snap the thousand silver strings in the harp
of life. This he shuddered at, but he consoled himself that it would be
over in a moment.

He took no food that day, but wrote to his father, to Eva, to Julian,
Violet, and De Vayne. He told them his purpose, and prayed their
forgiveness for all the wrongs he had done them. And then there se