"Hang it all, Brenton, what are you doing to yourself, these latter days?" he demanded, one morning after the four walls of his prison room had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him, during all the sultry night. "You look as fit as a fighting cock, when all the rest of us are grilly worms. How do you manage it? Whatever the state of your spiritual graces, at least you're growing in purely fleshly ones." Brenton laughed at the accent of the compliment which unmistakably was begrudged. Nevertheless, the laugh stopped short at his lips, and his gray eyes were sober as they looked down upon his friend. The "puffic' fibbous" was distinctly worse for wear, that morning. His eyes were heavy, and his wavy hair clung limply about the temples where the hollows were showing more and more clearly with every passing day. He was growing whiter, too, with the uncanny waxiness of a surface lighted from within. The absolute confinement and the pitiless heats of summer were telling on the "puffic' fibbous ", reducing him to the merest shell of his old-time self, and yet the shell was by no means hollow. Within it still lurked the old magnetic Reed, plucky, indomitable. "You're positively waxing fat, you healthy beggar," he went on, before Brenton could speak; "and Keltridge had the nerve to tell me he had been giving you a tonic. What went wrong? Digestion, the scourge of parsons? Or were you pining for your customary adulation, denied you now those college girls have gone off for the summer?" The lazy voice was full of contentment in its own mockery. To hear Reed speaking, one would have been sure that the world was all before him, waiting at his idle feet. Brenton's answer echoed the selfsame note. "Adulation, Opdyke! I'm a hard-worked clergyman, and target for more criticism than you engineers have ever dreamed of."