"Oh, Jeffries! I'm sorry to say--glad in one sense of course--that Professor Hitchcock will be taking the class again next Friday. The college wishes--wishes to thank you for stopping the gap as you have done. It's been most obliging of you." I said something--I was glad Hitchcock was better, I said. "Yes--er--he's quite well again now--quite on his feet again," said the secretary-bird. "And--er--Jeffries--I'm exceedingly sorry, but I've a rather unpleasant duty to perform." I was utterly mystified. "What is it now?" I demanded almost roughly. "It's that the Board is of opinion--has come to the conclusion--that consisting as we do of younger students than yourself--it would be of advantage--perhaps of advantage to you too if--if----" I helped him out. "If I don't come again?" "I wished to break it gently to you--but that _is_ the substance of it," he stammered. Curious.... "Thank you, Weston," I said. "I quite understand. Will you please tell them that I didn't ask for any explanation?" Exceedingly curious.... "Yes, yes, yes," he murmured sympathetically. "Now," I said to myself some minutes later, as I descended the stairs, "it only requires Miss Angela to turn me down." I walked to Woburn Place, and there asked a Swiss boy if I might see Miss Angela. Archie's friend Mr Shoto passed me as I waited in the hall, but I did not speak to him. After some minutes the Swiss boy returned. His answer was what I expected. Miss Soames had a nervous headache, and asked to be excused from seeing me. And all, I thought with amazement as I turned away, because for a week or two I had worn a sky-blue uniform! IV That division of me into two men that I have said dated from the time when Kitty told me of Evie's engagement to Archie Merridew was, in a sense, no new thing. I had felt it in some measure before, when I had deliberately avoided Archie that I might give my anger its head and had smiled in his face again when the fit had worked itself out. I had striven, too, to stand between him and the black rages he and my general circumstances had provoked. But no sooner had the words, that Evie was now definitely engaged, come from Kitty's lips than I knew this division to be complete and irrevocable. Even did he withdraw in time he had still contemplated it; and in my soul I did not now believe he would withdraw. "The Devil was sick, the Devil a Saint would be." And I knew at last who his friend in Store Street was. A name, seen on a medicine bottle in his room, had leaped into my memory. His "friend" was some obscure practitioner of a doctor. So I now became as the Giant in the story, who was so exquisitely cloven from head to middle by the magic blade that he did not feel the wound that was his death. "Cut, then!" he laughed. "Shake yourself," he was told. And he fell in twain. A shake, and I too should fall in twain. I will now tell you how I got that shake.