Again and again the professor had found his own eyes drawn to Squire as the student sat listening throughout each class. If the student was notable for anything it was his manly, athletic appearance and a certain mildness which confirmed what the professor had learned to respect as a fine and sensitive mind. This was enough to distinguish him from the hundreds of vapidly crew-cut, handsome, college juniors across the land. In the first place, Squire's head was covered with a mass of prematurely gray, almost white, whorls of hair, which in spite of frequent brushings refused to be repressed into conformity with the fashionable school cut. When it grew long, uncut, it brought one up sharp because of a certain resemblance between his head and that of a Hermes by Praxiteles. And then the eyes with their green, coppery burning expressed and projected a kind of inner warmth which threatened to break, bend, and melt the rigidities of academic formality.

This experience and a half a dozen like it had happened before, but being knowledgeable that there is a certain type of student who will commit anything whether out of perversity of mind or madness of spirit, destroying anyone who represents authority or restraint, Professor Knight had never let himself fall into any trap because fully cognizant that exposure in the academic world, even rumor, meant the end of a career, no matter how brilliant. How many friends of his in how many universities and colleges in how many narrow minded little towns had ended their careers tragically. He had accepted this limitation when he squarely faced joining the profession five years ago, and since, in spite of attractions, had preserved a glacial coolness toward temptations. The more obvious a student was, the more the professor became withdrawn and frigidly controlled. It had worked, but to his own disadvantage, as he readily admitted to himself in the darkness of the night lying sleepless, invunerable, and grotesquely alone. Now, one week before the end of the semester, he felt like a tightly wound bud, which because of some emptiness at its heart, never unfurled to expose its inner self to the regenerating sun and rain. Or, he admitted less romantically, more bitterly, to himself, like an alluvial deposit, waste, dry, desicated, which no river and no spring had awakened into life. In three weeks he would be on vacation once more, just as in the past five years, gradually regaining what the year, this one and all the others, had cost of emotion, creative energy, and mental stability. In Maine and alone. In the midst of his taut nerves he had planted and nourished a tiny, whithered seed of sanity.

Once though curiosity had led him to an examination of Squire's records from which he had learned that the student was a considerably better than average academically, played the piano, had been a first rate athlete in his mid-western high school. The death of his mother and father had left him an orphan at twelve, and an aunt had assumed responsibility for him since then. "This," he reflected sardonicly, "I shall file away in the green, steel cabinet, no, not in my office, but in my breast."

He left the lecture hall and walked undeviatingly in a straight line across the campus. Spring had come in a great rush, and being more than usually wet, the weather had caused everything to deepen into the profoundest green. The trees and grass were heavy with life as the sap flowed free after so many months of ice and snow. The air, heavy with the perfume and fecundity of the wet damp earth, moved softly laden with the smell of rose and honeysuckle and wisteria. The poplar outside his office threw up a great, green shaft into the cobalt of the sky. The professor suppressed a sigh and a slight shudder as he entered his office and sat down to grade papers lying on the cluttered desk. "Squire will be in to see me in three hours," he reflected mechanically. Glancing over his list of appointments,

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