To the under-classmen, Lyman was an object of healthy awe. Older than the average senior, he had been already in the larger world. His opinion of things had especial value even in his Junior year. After the football season, when he had been acknowledged the keenest manager the college had ever found, the under-classmen had a blind faith in his infallibility. The older students relied on him in much the same way, though there were some who said that self lay at the bottom of Lyman's system of morals, that the watchword of his philosophy was "Does it pay?" These men were sentimentalists who had ideals. Langdon, the Sequoia editor, would have told you that he thought more of Lyman than of any two men in the class; it is a question, though, whether he would have recommended Lyman's advice in everything. Frank was a good man to keep a Freshman's money for him, to listen to his class-room troubles or to stand between the luckless youngster and Faculty wrath; but when it was a case into which something deeper entered, perhaps the Senior's worldly philosophy was not of the best sort. This was the idea of dreamers like "Pegasus" Langdon, who said things about "sentiment" and to whom Freshmen seldom came for advice. But Lyman continued to hold his after-dinner receptions, and his admirers piled themselves comfortably on his bed and believed in him implicitly. The psychological moment came for the regular withdrawal. Frank opened his windows with care, donned the old bath-robe which was his armor for the battle intellectual, put on his eye-shade over his straight brown hair, and opened his Pollock. At this hint the others slipped out; only Jimmie Mason lingered, his gaze on the shadowy hills with their faint fringe of dark green, the dregs of his pipe purring in the stillness. Lyman's room-mate was somewhere queening. Lyman himself, pretending to study, looked up from time to time, waiting for the Sophomore to unbosom himself. Frank knew the symptoms. "Well, Jimmie?" he said at length--one couldn't study with that going on and Frank had his stint to finish. "It's about my father." "Drinking again?" Jimmie only nodded. The smoke went out in his pipe; he knocked the ashes from it and put it away mechanically in the common pipe-rack over the radiator. "Tell me about it." Frank had closed his book, and was leaning back in his tilted chair, his feet braced in the shelf beneath, his hands clasped over his knees. "Not much to tell, I guess, no more than you know already. I got a letter from the old lady." "Your grandmother, eh?" "Yes. She says something must be done. 'In low saloons,' she says, and I've been sizing it up--and Frank, don't you think I ought to go home?" A silence again, with Lyman's alarm clock ticking placidly on the table between them. It had come, the moment to bring the boy around; Frank had waited for it in the weeks since he had known the story. In this silence he mapped out his argument, as he would have prepared a brief.