Ernest, appreciating his aunt's devotion, tried to repay it by thorough work--tried, yet failed. For, after all, study is not the only absorbing interest at Cambridge. Sports in the field, practice on the river, these stir the blood and take a young man's time. A good-looking lad with a well-known name, connected with various families of reputed wealth and high position, has every chance for popularity at Harvard. But a popular man with limited means has to pay a price for popularity. Ernest spent his fairly liberal allowance to the last cent. He had to entertain, had to do things that were, though he knew it not, a great strain on his aunt's purse. Though he had entered college without the social advantages of a preparation at one of the private schools, he soon had many friends. Miss Theodora was pleased with her nephew's success. John had been popular, and it would have been strange indeed had the son not followed in the father's footsteps. She could not conceal from herself, however, a definite uneasiness that Ernest, unlike his father, showed little interest in his studies. He grumbled not a little at the course laid out for him, complained that he would have hardly a wider choice of studies in his sophomore year, and ascribed all his shortcomings in examinations to the fact that he was rigorously held down to uncongenial work. Nor was he altogether wrong, for many a Harvard student in those days longed for freedom from the fetters of prescribed studies. [Illustration] XIII. One Sunday afternoon in the early May of his freshman year, after the service at Trinity, Ernest took his way toward the Digbys' house. Since midwinter many things had tended to make him regard life less hopefully than before. Just as his own shortcomings at college were growing so evident that he could not conceal them either from himself or his aunt, the death of Stuart Digby cast a cloud over him which made other shadows dwindle. For he had been very fond of his cousin, and he sympathized to the full with Kate in her grief.