ladder. He told himself when he awoke that he was a presumptuous ass even to dream that she would care for him. What was there in him for such a girl to care about? All the same, he set his teeth and from that moment laid all his future plans and his hopes and ambitions and all the best of his nature, at her little feet—and knew perfectly well that if Betty could not love him eventually he would walk alone through life.

Odd, romantic or foolish as it may seem, when youth falls in and out of love so easily, this was true. Peter had, with a sort of unrealized solemnity, kept his heart free and pure. He was no trifler—he had never philandered. Like the boy who, perhaps unduly imaginative, believes that he will find the place where the rainbow ends, Peter said to himself: "One day I shall find my girl. I want to go to her heart-whole and complete."

There was nothing of sentimentality about this. It was simply the outcome of the effect of the mother-influence upon the boy which had become a very concrete thing. Somehow, ever since he was old enough to remember and to think, he had looked upon his mother as his sweetheart, and when she bent over his cot at night and asked God to bless him and left the touch of her soft lips upon his forehead she had impressed upon him the unconscious ambition to make another such woman the centre of his own home. The numerous tender services, the exquisite maternal thoughtfulness of this little mother-woman, had been built up by him into a protection and a lode-star. Betty came—a girl in whom he recognized at once another mother—and she just touched his heart with her finger and walked straight in, fitting into the place which had been kept for her like a diamond into its setting.

Poor dear old Peter! No one would have thought, who looked at him sitting there in his big awkwardness and incoherence, that he was a man in love, although a psychologist or even an ordinarily observant girl could very easily have told how Betty felt.

"Topping, isn't it?" he said.

"Simply wonderful," she replied.

"Tired?"

"Not a bit."

"Pretty good floor, eh?"

"Perfectly splendid."

"Gee! I shall miss this place."

"Why, of course you will."

"All the same, I shall be mighty keen to get at things,—and begin."

"Yes, of course you will."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, that's easy."

"Is it? How?"

"Well, don't I know you?"

"Do you? I wish you did."

Up in the branches something stirred. It may have been Cupid—probably it was.

But silence followed this conversational effort—a silence broken by a great heaving sigh, mostly of excitement, and the strains of the band which drifted out of the windows of the College Hall.

And over them both, as over all other men and women, young and old, at the beginning and at the end, hung the moon and the stars.

How good it is to be young and in love!

VI

Unnoticed by Mrs. Guthrie and her two boys, there was something more than a little pathetic in the Doctor's eager, wistful attitude toward the rather thoughtless, high-spirited, seething youth in the middle of which he found himself for the first time.

This man had never been young. The atmosphere of the farm on which he had been born killed youth as foul air kills a caged bird. Poverty, sordidness and the grim, constant struggle to live made his childhood and early days utterly devoid of the good sweet things. His mother, worn out and dispirited, died in giving him birth, and his father, bitter, lonely and filled with the irony that comes from a long and unprofitable hand-to-hand fight with mother-earth, let him bring himself up. He was turned out to work at a time when most lads are sent to school. He had to trudge daily into the straggling, one-eyed town, at an early hour, to report at the chemist's store where he obtained employment as an errand boy. Most of the small wages he earned were required by his father. From almost the very beginning life was to him a sort of whirling stream into which he had been flung before having been taught to swim. Mere self-preservation demanded that he should keep himself afloat. He picked up education as a stray dog picks up an occasional bone. There was, however, great grit in this boy and deep down in his soul an ambition to become something better than his father, whose daily wrestle with nature—the most relentless of task-mistresses—had warped his character and stultified his soul. Young Hunter shuddered at the thought of living always on the farm, of grubbing in the earth, of planting and hoeing and reaping, of facing the almost inevitable tragedy of spoiled crops and ruined hopes, and the yearly set-backs of advancing freights and higher wages. He looked with growing horror and detestation at the farm implements among which his father spent his life; and while he ran his errands, carrying medicines and soda syphons, he nursed a dream in his little cold heart, which grew out of the smell of medicines and the talk of illness that was all about him in the chemist store. It was to become a doctor and tend the needs of humanity and, if it was in his power, to save to other children the mothers who brought them into being.

No wonder Dr. Hunter Guthrie wore strong glasses over his short-sighted eyes. At all times, with a sort of greed and an almost terrible eagerness, he read every medical book on which he could lay his hands,—in bed by the light of one candle, in the cubby-hole at the back of the store under the glare of the unshaded electric bulb, in trolley-cars and trains, and on the stoop of the shabby farmhouse so long as the light lasted. Later, after his day's work, he attended night classes, and even as he walked from the farm to the town he read. Spending sleepless nights and living laborious days he followed the example of many other brave and determined boys whose names gleam like beacons in the history of their country. He worked his way through the necessary stages until finally, after a struggle so relentless that it nearly broke his health, he became a qualified doctor. In order to earn the money for his courses he was at different times bell-boy in a country hotel, an advertisement writer in a manufacturer's office, a clerk for a real-estate man and a traveling salesman for safety razors. His vacations were more arduous than his terms, and during these he earned the money with which to pay his college expenses. Every step up the ladder of innumerable rungs—which sometimes seemed to him impossible to climb—was painful and difficult. So much concentration was needed from the very beginning—so much condensed determination and energy required—that at the age of twenty-five he seemed to have lived twice that number of years. No wonder then that the all-conquering youthfulness of all the undergraduates amongst whom he found himself at Oxford awoke a sort of envy in his heart and startled him who had never been young. There was no meanness, jealousy or sense of martyrism in his feelings as he watched the kaleidoscopic picture of university life—only a sort of wonder and amazement that there were men in the world so lucky—so indescribably fortunate as to be able to carry boyhood and all its joys forward to an age when he had forgotten that such a period existed. Many times during those interesting and stirring days he stopped suddenly and thanked his God that he had been able to do for his own boys those things which no one had ever done for him, and give them such a chance in life as he had never had. Actually to see Peter, his eldest boy, proving his muscular strength and his mental ability and