“I suppose so,” sighed Edgar; “but it’s so easy for women to be good!  I know you were born a saint, to begin with.  You don’t know what it is to be in college, and to want to do everything that you can’t and ought n’t, and nothing that you can and ought, and get all tangled up in things you never meant to touch.  However, we ’ll see!”

Polly peeped in at the door very softly.

“They have n’t any light; that ’s favorable.  He ’s sitting on my footstool; he need n’t suppose he is going to have that place!  I think she has her hand on his arm,—­yes, she has!  And he is stroking it!  Oh, you poor innocent child, you do not realize that that soft little hand of my mother’s never lets go!  It slips into a five and three-quarters glove, but you ’ll be surprised, Mr. Edgar, when you discover you cannot get away from it.  Very well, then; it is settled.  I ’ll go back and put the salt fish in soak for my boarder’s breakfast.  I seem to have my hands rather full!—­a house to keep, an invalid mother, and now a boarder.  The very thing I vowed that I never would have—­another boarder; what grandmamma would have called an ’unstiddy boy boarder!”

And as Polly clattered the pots and pans, the young heathen in the parlor might have heard her fresh voice singing with great energy: 

  “Shall we, whose souls are lighted
  With wisdom from on high,—­
  Shall we to men benighted
  The lamp of life deny?”

CHAPTER IX.

HARD TIMES.

The new arrangement worked exceedingly well.

As to Edgar’s innermost personal feelings, no one is qualified to speak with any authority.  Whether he experienced a change of heart, vowed better things, prayed to be delivered from temptation, or simply decided to turn over a new leaf, no one knows; the principal fact in his life, at this period, seems to have been an unprecedented lack of time for any great foolishness.

Certain unpleasant things had transpired on that eventful Friday night when he had missed his appointment with his fellow-students, which had resulted in an open scandal too disagreeable to be passed over by the college authorities; the redoubtable Tony had been returned with thanks to his fond parents in a distant part of the state, and two others had been temporarily suspended.

Edgar Noble was not too blind to see the happy chance that interfered with his presence on that occasion, and was sensible enough to realize that, had he been implicated in the least degree (he scorned the possibility of his taking any active part in such scurrilous proceedings), he would probably have shared Tony’s fate.