“‘Pamela, Pamela, what have you done?’ ‘I’ve been shooting the chutes with Sir Charles Grandison.’” “Do you see? It goes on like that, only I haven’t had time yet to make the thing complete. Now let’s begin; it’s late.” Haydock closed the book thoughtfully and went over to the window. He stood a moment looking out at the thick fog, and wondering what he should do. He hadn’t the slightest intention any longer of spending the rest of the night in a futile effort to scrape Billy through an examination. The child had already cut two, and failed in one, John had said. But the senior was in doubt as to whether his concern in the mess young Ware had made of his first few months of college, ought to end there, with a bland “good-night,” or whether he ought to see the thing out, in--say, the manner in which he would engineer the calamity, had Billy happened to be his young brother. A senior feels toward a freshman, older than he will ever feel toward anything again--older, probably, than he will feel even when called on to give advice to his own offspring. Haydock realised so well what was going to happen to Billy--Billy, whose progress in college from the first, had been the progress of a flimsy butterfly in a stiff breeze. He knew to an inch the quantity of perfectly necessary but distressing red tape that would have to be measured before Mrs. Ware and the college Office could come to anything like a common understanding. And even then Mrs. Ware wouldn’t understand much of anything. It always seemed to Haydock that men and women in becoming parents somehow or other managed to forfeit a great deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist with children, if this was a provision or a perversion of nature. Mrs. Ware was the sort of woman who would take an hour and a half to inform the Dean that William was a “good boy at heart,”--that his cheerfulness had always been “a ray of sunshine” in her life; the Dean, all the while, knowing that the twenty-five young men he had summoned to appear before him that morning, were waiting apprehensively in the outer office to “have it over with.” Since there was no question in Haydock’s mind just then of how to keep Billy in college, he asked himself if it wouldn’t be less painful to every one concerned to get him out with decency and despatch. “It’s late,” repeated Dilly, listlessly. “Yes, that’s the trouble,” said Haydock, turning away from the window. He said it kindly, regretfully, but with a seriousness that rather alarmed Dilford, and could not be ignored by Billy. “It’s too late. There’s no use in being tiresome and melo-dramatic about the thing, but that’s the simple fact; you’ve come to the end of your string, and you’ve got to let go before they slap your hands and take it away from you. If you don’t know what it means,--probation, and cutting two exams, and flunking a third--” “John told you that,” broke in Billy, angrily.