Silently we all turned down into the soft, padded path that ran along the piny shore of our little college lake. Sagner of course led the way. Madge Hubert followed close. And I tagged along behind as merrily as I could. Twice I saw the girl's shoulders shudder. "Don't you like the woods, Miss Hubert?" I called out experimentally. She stopped at once and waited for me to catch up with her. There was the very faintest possible suggestion of timidity in the action. "Don't you like the woods?" I repeated. She shook her head. "No, not especially," she answered. "That is, not all woods. There's such a difference. Some woods feel as though they had violets in them, and some woods feel as though they had--Indians." I couldn't help laughing. "How about these woods?" I quizzed. She gave a little gasp. "I don't believe there are violets in any woods to-night," she faltered. Even as she spoke we heard a swish and a crackle ahead of us and Sagner came running back. "Let's go round the other way," he insisted. "I won't go round the other way," said Madge Hubert. "How perfectly absurd! What's the matter?" Even as she argued we stepped out into the open clearing and met Harold Lennart and "Little Sister" singing their way home hand in hand through the witching night. For an instant our jovial greetings parried together, and then we passed. Not till we had reached Madge Hubert's doorstep did I lose utterly the wonderful lilting echo of that young contralto voice with the man's older tenor ringing in and out of it like a shimmery silver lining. Ten minutes later in Sagner's cluttered workroom we two men sat and stared through our pipe-smoke into each other's evasive eyes. "Madge didn't--hesitate at all--to tell me a thing or two to-night, did she?" Sagner began at last, gruffly. I smiled. The relaxation made me feel as though my mouth had really got a chance at last to sit down. "Am I so very old?" persisted Sagner. "I'm not forty-five." I shrugged my shoulders. Pettishly he reached out and clutched at a scalpel, cleansed it for an instant in the flame, and jabbed the point of it into his wrist. The red blood spurted instantly. "There!" he cried out triumphantly. "I have blood in me! It isn't embalming fluid at all." "Oh, quit your fooling, you old death-digger," I said. And then with overtense impulse I asked, "Sagner, man, do you really understand Life?"