“Good-bye—­oh, good-bye,” said Fifi, and turned her head toward the open window with the blue skies beyond.

Did Fifi know?  How many have vainly tortured themselves with that question, as they have watched dear ones slipping without a word down the slopes to the dark Valley!  If this child knew that her name had been read out for the greater Graduation, she gave no sign.  Sometimes in the mornings she cried a little, without knowing why.  Sometimes she said a vague, sad little thing that brought her mother’s heart, stone cold, to her mouth.  But her talk was mostly very bright and hopeful.  Ten minutes before Queed came in she had been telling Mrs. Paynter about something she would do in the fall.  If sometimes you would swear that she knew there would never be another fall for her, her very next remark might confound you.  So her little face turned easily to the great river with the shining farther shore, and, for her part, there would be no sadness of farewell when she embarked.

By marvelous work, Queed closed up the twenty-five minutes of time he had bestowed upon Fifi, and pulled into supper only three minutes behind running-time.  After-wards, he sat in the Scriptorium, his face like a carven image, the sacred Schedule in his hands.  For it had come down to that.  Either he must at any cost hew his way back to the fastness of his early days, or he must corrupt the Schedule yet again.

Every minute that he took away from his book meant just that much delay in giving the great work to the world.  That fact was the eternal backbone of all his consciousness.  On the other balance of his personal equation, there was Buck Klinker and there was Fifi Paynter.

Klinker evidently felt that all bars were down as to him.  It would be a hard world indeed if a trainer was denied free access to his only pupil, and Klinker, though he had but the one, was always in as full blast as Muldoon’s.  He had acquired a habit of “dropping in” at all hours, especially late at night, which, to say the least, was highly wasteful of time.  It was Queed’s privilege to tell Klinker that he must keep away from the Scriptorium; but in that case Klinker might fairly retort that he would no longer give the Doc free physical culture.  Did he care to bring that issue to the touch?  No, he did not.  In fact, he must admit that he had a distinct need of Buck, a distinct dependence upon him, for awhile yet at any rate.  So he could make no elimination of the non-essential there.

Then there was Fifi.  In a week, or possibly two weeks, Fifi would doubtless reappear in his dining-room, and if she had no lessons to trouble him with, she would at any rate feel herself free to talk to him whenever the whim moved her.  Had she not let out this very day that she considered that she had a kind of title to his time?  So it would be to the end of the chapter.  It had been his privilege to tell Fifi that he could not spare her another minute of