room, lost in reverie; then paused at his desk and tore the letter once across with the evident intention of destroying it; but he hesitated, changed his mind, and carried it to his bedroom.  There he took from a closet shelf a battered tin box marked “A.  Kelton, U.S.N.” which contained his commissions in the Navy.  He sat down on the bed, folded the letter the long way of the sheet and indorsed it in pencil:  “Declined.”  Then he slipped it under the faded tape that bound the official papers together, and locked and replaced the box.

Sylvia meanwhile had found the review article noted on her grandfather’s memorandum, and leaving a receipt with the librarian started home with the book under her arm.  Halfway across the campus she met her grandfather’s caller, hurrying townward.  He lifted his hat, and Sylvia paused a moment to ask if he had found her grandfather.

“Yes; thank you.  My business didn’t take much time, you see.  I’m sorry I put you to so much bother.”

“Oh, that was nothing.”

“Is that new building the college library?”

“Yes,” replied Sylvia.  “Are you a Madison man?”

“No.  I was never here before.  I went to a very different college and”—­he hesitated—­“a little bigger one.”

“I suppose there are bigger colleges,” Sylvia remarked, with the slightest accent on the adjective.

The young man laughed.

“That’s the right spirit!  Madison needs no praise from me; it speaks for itself.  Is this the nearest way to the station?”

It had been on Sylvia’s tongue to ask him the name of his college, but he had perhaps read this inquiry in her eyes, and as though suddenly roused by the remembrance of the secrecy that had been imposed upon him, he moved on.

“Yes, I understand,” he called over his shoulder.  “Thank you, very much.”

He whistled softly to himself as he continued on his way, still glancing about alertly.

The manner of the old professor in receiving the letter and the calmness with which he had given his reply minimized the importance of the transaction in the mind of the messenger.  He was thinking of Sylvia and smiling still at her implication that while there were larger colleges than Madison there was none better.  He turned to look again at the college buildings closely clasped by their strip of woodland.  Madison was not a college to sneer at; he had scanned the bronze tablet on the library wall that published the roll of her Sons who had served in the Civil War.  Many of the names were written high in the state’s history and for a moment they filled the young man’s mind.

As she neared home Sylvia met her friend Dr. Wandless, the former president, who always had his joke with her.

“Hail, Lady of the Constellations!  You have been looting the library, I see.  Hast thou named the stars without a gun?”

“That isn’t right,” protested Sylvia.  “You’re purposely misquoting.  You’ve only spoiled Emerson’s line about the birds.”