Her eyes became dreamy. "How shall I say thank you?... I know. I must give you one of my pretty flowers for your buttonhole." She began pulling out one of the glorious roses, but suddenly checked herself and gazed off pensively into space, a finger at her lip. "Ah! I thought this gesture seemed strangely familiar, and now I remember. I gave him a flower once before, and ah, look!... the president of the college has tossed it away." West glanced hastily down at his buttonhole. The lily-of-the-valley was gone; he had no idea where he had lost it, nor could he now stay to inquire. The rose he took with tender carefulness from the upper pocket of his waistcoat. "What did Mademoiselle expect?" said he, with a courtly bow. "The president wears it over his heart." Sharlee's smile was a coronation for a man. "That one was for the president. This new one," said she, plucking it out, "is for the director and--the man." This new one, after all, she put into his buttonhole with her own hands, while he held her great bunch of them. As she turned away from the dainty ceremony, her color faintly heightened, Sharlee looked straight into the narrow eyes of Miss Avery, who, talking with a little knot of men some distance away, had been watching her closely. The two girls smiled and bowed to each other with extraordinary sweetness. X _Of Fifi on Friendship, and who would be sorry if Queed died; of Queed's Mad Impulse, sternly overcome; of his Indignant Call upon Nicolovius, the Old Professor_. Could I interrupt you for just a minute, Mr. Queed?" "No. It is not time yet." "Cicero's so horrid to-night." "Don't scatter your difficulties, as I've told you before. Gather them all together and have them ready to present to me at the proper time. I shall make the usual pause," said Mr. Queed, "at nine sharp." Fifi, after all, had been selfish enough to take the little Doctor at his word. He had both given her the freedom of his dining-room and ordered her to bring her difficulties to him, instead of sitting there and noisily crying over them. And she had done his bidding, night after night. For his part he had stuck manfully by his moment of reckless generosity, no matter how much he may have regretted it. He helped Fifi, upon her request, without spoken protest or censure. But he insisted on doing it after an iron-clad schedule: Absolute silence until nine o'clock; then an interlude for the solving of difficulties; absolute silence after that; then at 9.45 a second interlude for the solving of the last difficulties of the night. The old rule of the dining-room, the _Silence_ sign, had been necessarily suspended, but the young man enforced his schedule of hours far more strictly than the average railroad. "Nine o'clock," he announced presently. "Bring me your difficulties." Fifi's brain was at low ebb to-night. She came around with several books, and he jabbed his pencil at her open Cicero with some contempt.