If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,--gave him, say, the undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,--well, that would be tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass. When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there. That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness. Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college. There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly--without opening it--into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s midyear mark in the records as C.