So it went on through the winter and spring, till it was nearing the time for the summer vacation. The professor knew only too well that Rosamond had been invited to spend it with some distant cousins,--distant in both senses of the word,--and that on her return she would be swallowed up by the academy and would brighten the dingy boarding-house no more. How could he bear it? His arid, silent life had never had a song in it before. Must the song die out in silence? When the last evening came, and when, realizing the long separation before them, she once more held up her face for a kiss, with trembling lips and blue eyes swimming in tears, as she told him how she should miss him, how she did not see what she should do without him, his hardly-won firmness was as chaff before the wind. He implored her to marry him; he told her of the beautiful home he would make for her. "For I am rich, Rosamond," he said hurriedly, before, in her surprise, she could speak. "I have not cared for money, and I believe I have a great deal. You shall do what you will with it, and with me. We will travel: you shall see the Old World, with all its wonders. And I will shield you: you shall never know a trouble or a care that I can take on myself; for--I love you." Then, as she remained silent, too much astonished to speak, he said beseechingly,-- "You _do_ love me a little? You could not come to me as you do, with all your little cares and perplexities, if you did not: could you?" "But I came just so to papa," she said, finding voice at last; and her childish face grew perplexed and troubled. The professor had no answer for that. He hid his face in his hands. In a moment her arms were about his neck, her kisses were falling on his hands. "You have been so good to me," she cried, "and I am making you unhappy, ungrateful wretch that I am! Of course I love you; of course I will marry you. Take away your hands and look at me--Paul!" Ah, well! they tell in fairy-stories of the fountain of youth, and even amid the briers of this work-a-day world it is found sometimes, I think, by the divining-rod of Love. But many students gnashed their teeth, and, as we have said, Miss Christina Eldridge alone, of all the dear five hundred, said, "What possessed _him_?" II. The summer vacation was over, and students, more or less reluctantly, had returned to college and academy. The professor came back in a brand-new and very becoming suit of clothes; his hair and beard had been trimmed by a fashionable barber, and his old-fashioned high "stock" exchanged for a modern scarf, in the centre of which gleamed a modern scarf-pin. He ran lightly up the steps of the academy and inquired for Miss May. Courtesy, as his uneasy conscience told him, dictated an inquiry for Miss Eldridge also, but he compounded with conscience: he would ask to see her after he had seen Rosamond.