"_What_?" demanded John Burnarde all over again. The winter wind seemed to have faded oddly from one cheek but was still spotting hecticly in the other. "_What_?" he persisted bewilderedly, still struggling with his overshoes. "Why it's the Bretton girl!" prompted a sharp voice from some dark seat in the corner. "That pretty little Bretton girl," regretted a gentler tone. "Yes--I--I--know who you mean," stammered Burnarde. "But--but----" "Always made me think of apple-blossoms--somehow," confided the old Mathematics professor a bit surreptitiously. "Apple-blossoms?" mumbled poor Burnarde. "So sort of pink and white and fresh and--and [42] fragrant. 'Pon my soul when she comes into my class and takes a front seat it makes me feel a little queer. It's like being a boy again! Young grass, May morning, and a wind through the apple orchard! Fragrancy? Yes, that's it!" "Yes, it's just exactly the flagrancy of it that makes the scandal so complete!" interposed the President's keenly incisive feminine voice. Instantly every eye except Burnarde's reverted to the unquestionable dominance of the President's ash-blond personality. Burnarde alone, looming lean, keen, tense, on the edge of the group, with five generations of poise and reticence masking the precipitant horror in his mind, stood staring blankly from one face to another of his cruder-birthed associates. "I--protest!" he said. "Protest?" questioned the President's coolly inflected voice. "Protest what?" With a graceful if somewhat studied gesture of patience Miss Claudia Merriwayne laid down her jotting pencil and narrowed her cold gray eyes to the eyes of her youngest [43] professor. "You were a little late getting here I think, Mr. Burnarde," she admonished him perfectly courteously, "but the general circumstances of the case you have gleaned quite sufficiently, I think, even in this last brief moment or so? Surely in a case so--so distressing," she flushed, "it will not be necessary for us to--to revive the details in all their entirety? In the half hour that we have been discussing the matter. It _is_ a half hour, isn't it?" she turned sharply and asked of her nearest neighbor. "Fully a half hour!" gloated the nearest neighbor. "Miss Bretton, of course, will have to leave college," resumed the President succinctly. "Definitely--positive expulsion is, of course, the only path open to us!" "I protest!" said John Burnarde.