For the fellows asked him that, of course, when he met them in the Yard or in the electric cars; and Haydock tarried once or twice after his lecture and hoped politely that he was coming to the next club dinner. He wasn’t at the next club dinner, however, nor the next, nor the next. Haydock stopped reminding him of them. The club had gradually ceased to have any but a spectacular interest for Thorn. His part at a dinner there would be--and, since his return, always had been--that of decorous audience in the stalls, watching a sprightly farce. The club didn’t insist on an audience, so Thorn’s meetings with its members were few. He saw Haydock and Prescott, in a purely official way, more than any of them. Strangely enough, Prescott seemed to be trying to do better in Thorn’s course. He came to the lectures as regularly as he had avoided them before the midyears. He handed in written work of such ingenious unintelligence that there was no question in Thorn’s mind as to the boy’s having conscientiously evolved it unaided. The instructor liked the spirit of Prescott’s efforts, although it was a perpetual “rubbing in,” of the memory of his own indiscretion; it displayed a pretty understanding of _noblesse oblige_. The second half year was long and dreary and good for Thorn. It set him down hard,--so hard that when he collected himself and began to look about him once more, he knew precisely where he was--which was something he hadn’t known until then. He was thirty-two years old; he looked thirty-five, and he felt a hundred, to begin with. He wasn’t an undergraduate, and he hadn’t been one for a good many years. He still felt that he loved youth and sympathised with its every phase,--from its mindless gambolings to its preposterous maturity. But he knew now that it was with the love and sympathy of one who had lost it. He had learned, too, that when it goes, it bids one a cavalier adieu, and takes with it what one has come to regard as one’s rights,--like a saucy house-maid departing with the spoons. He knew that he had no rights; he had forfeited them by losing some of his hair. He wouldn’t get any of them back again until he had lost all of it. He was the merest speck on the horizon of the fellows whom he had, earlier in the year, tried to know on a basis of equality,--a speck too far away, too microscopic even to annoy them. If he had only known it all along, he told himself, how different his year might have been. He wouldn’t have squandered the first four months of it, for one thing, in a stupid insistence on a relation that must of necessity be artificial--unsatisfying. He wouldn’t have spent the last five of it in coming to his senses. He wouldn’t have misused all of it in burning--or at least in allowing to fall into a precarious state of unrepair--the bridges that led back to the friends of his own age and time. “I have learned more than I have taught, this year,” thought Thorn. * * * * *