Was it to be abandoned, or were they to try and carry on? The latter possibility seemed too fearful. How could he go into that room again? But one must proceed cautiously. It would never do, for example, to come out and treat the whole thing as a distinctly juvenile performance, something they had quite outgrown, until it was clear that they had outgrown it. Again, now was not the time to explain the real nature of his lecture. He could do that when the whole thing had become an amusing memory. "What are we going to do about Mr. Sprig?" asked Tom vaguely. "You mean are we going to keep on with the lectures?" "Well, yes." "What do you think? Last night I was so sick about the whole thing that I was ready to give it all up, but now I wonder if it isn't our duty to give it one more trial." Her words were disappointing, but the dispirited tone in which she said them was cheering, and Tom made so bold as to sing the lately revived "Duty, duty must be done, the rule applies to everyone, and painful though the duty be, to shirk the task were fiddle-dee-dee..."; a happy impulse, for when Henry arrived from his five o'clock he found Tom at the piano and Nancy sitting by him, the one in the role of the Mikado of Japan and the other as his daughter-in-law-elect. When, however, on the following Tuesday they again climbed down from the fourth floor of the Whitman building, the light had indeed gone out of the undertaking. Mr. Sprig's subject, the digestive and excretory tracts, had not been a propitious one for so critical a time. Leofwin, who had invited himself along, had been captivated by the decorative possibilities of the alimentary canal and had led the discussion following the lecture with a vigour and thoroughness trying for those unfamiliar with an artist's training. "Don't you think it might be fun to trace something all the way from the initial bite down?" he asked. "Let's take an olive, a green olive. 'Back to Nature by A. Green Olive: A Drama in Six Acts and any Number of Scenes.'" Tom was looking intently at the diagrams on the walls. At musical comedies and the movies, when embarrassing situations arose, one was, in a measure, prepared. The darkness, too, helped, and one could stare straight ahead until the relief, which was rarely long in coming, arrived. There was, finally, the comfort of numbers. But now they were only two--the artist and the scientist being immune to shame. It was, furthermore, extremely bright, everybody was out in the open, and although the amateurs had come prepared for a momentary brush with a bowel or two, they had no reason to expect a prolonged causerie upon even more intimate matters. Tom was, accordingly, hot with embarrassment, and he had reason to believe that Nancy was also.