Shuffling a little in his overshoes, jerking his coat-collar just a bit tighter around his throat, John Burnarde felt suddenly very old. "Old? Merciful Heavens!" he winced. He was only thirty-five! Did Age come like that to a man in just the time it took him to go up and down the same gray, creaky, familiar stairs? "Apple Blossoms was it that the old Mathematics Professor had said she looked like? But God knew it wasn't just her little face that was Apple Blossomy, but her little mind also, and the little glad gay heart of her! So fresh, so new, so virgin-sweet! By what foul chance, by what incalculable circumstance, had she blundered into _this_?" Stripped of passion, stripped even of protest, stripped indeed of every human emotion except his dignity and his pain he pushed his [49] way blindly out through interminable heavy doors and breasted the winter night. Then quite suddenly, stripped of every emotion _except_ pain, he swung around in his tracks, remounted the stairs, re-entered the President's office, and slamming the door be hind him, flung down even his dignity on the altar of his love. "Miss Merriwayne!" he said. "This thing that you propose doing--cannot be done! I am engaged to Miss Bretton!" For a single instant only, every knowledge, manner, poise, that John Burnarde had been born with, defied every knowledge, manner, poise, that Claudia Merriwayne had worked forty years to acquire. Then reverting suddenly to the identical accent with which Claudia Merriwayne's mother was still lashing Claudia Merriwayne's father, doubtless, in the little far away North Kansas home, the College President opened her thin lips to speak. "The thing--is already done,--Mr. Burnarde," she said. "Miss Bretton left town an hour ago--and with her paramour, I am told!" [50] "With her--what?" cried John Burnarde. "With her 'paramour,'" repeated the President coolly. "The word is unfortunate," frowned Burnarde. "So--is the episode," said the President. With a little sharp catch of his breath John Burnarde stepped forward to the edge of the desk. "You understand that I am going to marry Miss Bretton?" he affirmed with some incisiveness. "Not in my college!" said the President. "Nor in any other college if I even so much as remotely gauge either the professional or the social exigencies of the situation." Emphatically, but by no means extravagantly, she drove her meaning home. "Do you dream for one single moment, Mr. Burnarde," she quizzed, "that any reputable college in the land would accept, or maintain on its faculty," she added significantly, "a man whose wife for reasons of moral obliquity had not been considered a safe associate for----" "You mean----" interrupted John Burnarde. [51] "Everything that I say," acquiesced the President, "and everything that I imply." "That is your ultimatum?" questioned John Burnarde. "That is my ultimatum!" said the President.