Despite his blithe farewell, Reed's brown eyes drooped heavily, after he had watched the two of them pass out of sight around the corner of the doorway. Good comrades? Yes. The thin lips lost their steadiness, quivered a little, then opened, to send an answer out to the final hail that came back to him from the hall below. A moment afterward, the chin quivered, even as the lips had done, and something glittered on the long brown lashes. "Ramsdell?" Reed said, a little later. "Yes, sir." "How long have you been working on this thing?" "Eleven months and a 'alf, sir." "Have I made any gain at all?" "Ye--es, sir. Oh, yes." Reed smiled grimly. "How much am I going to keep on gaining?" "Well, sir," Ramsdell's accent was supposed to be encouraging; "you see, there's always 'ope, sir." "I'm glad of so much. Well, never mind about that now. I want to send a telegram. Please get the blanks." With Ramsdell seated by his side, blanks in one hand, fountain pen in the other, Opdyke paused to consider. "Well, there's no use beating about the bush. I may as well go straight to the point. Ready, Ramsdell? All right. _To H. P. Whittenden, Seven, Blank Street, New York City._ Sure you've got that right? All right. Then: _Getting badly bored and losing grip fast. Come pull me out. Opdyke._ That's all, Ramsdell. Send it off, to-night." Next afternoon, Whittenden came, to all seeming the same unspoiled, curly-headed youngster who had helped to open Brenton's eyes, so long ago, to the real good there was in life, despite the melancholy teachings of his early Calvinism. The professor was busy with a class, Mrs. Opdyke had a cold; and so it came about that Olive, dropping in, that morning, and hearing of the dilemma, offered to drive down to meet the guest. "You always were a comfort, Olive," Reed assured her gratefully. "You've a general-utility sort of disposition that seems to balk at nothing, and therefore we all impose upon you. Sure you don't mind? You can't miss Whittenden. I've told you too many things about him, and he looks exactly the sort of man he is." Olive did not miss him. More than that, she used the fifteen minutes of their drive together to impress upon the guest's mind the salient facts of Reed's history during the past eleven months, facts largely of the spirit, not a mere physical chronology. "And the worst of it all is," she said, as she drew up at the Opdyke gate; "we none of us, however much we care for him, however hard we try, can get inside the situation and share it with him. He is bound to go through it, all alone. That is the most maddening phase of the whole thing." But Whittenden, looking into her brown eyes, had his doubts of that. Before he went to bed, that night, his doubts were even greater.