I saw the woman's shoulders hunch as though her hands were bracing against the table. Then she reached out like a flash and clutched the little lad's chin in her fingers. If a voice-tone has any color, hers was corpse-white. "I never--let--_you_--know--that--you--were--too--_young_!" she almost hissed. And I shut my eyes. When I looked up again the woman was gone, and the little lad was running after her with a queer, puzzled look on his face. Life has such a strange way of foreshortening its longest plots with a startling, snapped-off ending. Any true story is a tiny bit out of rhetorical proportion. The very next day, under the railroad trestle that hurries us back and forth to the big, neighboring city, we found Mrs. Lennart's body in a three-foot pool of creek water. It was the little lad's birthday, it seems, and he was to have had a supper party, and she had gone to town in the early afternoon to make a few festive purchases. A package of tinsel-paper bonbons floated safely, I remember, in the pool beside her. For some inexplainable reason she had stepped off the train at the wrong station and, realizing presumably how her blundering tardiness would blight the little lad's pleasure, she had started to walk home across the trestle, hoping thereby to beat the later train by as much as half an hour. The rest of the tragedy was brutally plain. Somehow between one safe, friendly embankment and another she had slipped and fallen. The trestle was ticklish walking for even a person who wasn't lame. Like a slim, white, waxen altar candle snuffed out by a child's accidental, gusty pleasure-laugh, we brought her home to the sweet, green, peaceful library, with its resolute, indomitable hearthstone. Out of all the crowding people who jostled me in the hallway I remember only--Lennart's ghastly, agonized face. "Go and tell Sagner," he said. Even as I crossed the campus the little, fluttery, flickery, hissing word "suicide" was in the air. From the graduates' dormitory I heard a man's voice argue, "But why did she get off deliberately at the wrong station?" Out of the president's kitchen a shrill tone cackled, "Well, she ain't been herself, they say, for a good many weeks. And who wonders?" In one corner of the laboratory, close by an open window, I found Sagner working, as I had expected, in blissful ignorance. "What's the matter?" he asked bluntly. I was very awkward. I was very clumsy. I was very frightened. My face was all condensed like a telegram. "Madge Hubert was right," I stammered. "Mrs. Lennart's--business--has gone into the hands of a--receiver." The glass test tube went brittling out of Sagner's fingers. "Do you mean that she is--dead?" he asked. I nodded.