* * * * *

Kate’s frequent visits to Lena, though brief, were none too welcome.  Even the food she brought with her might better, in Lena’s estimation, be dispensed with than that the all-absorbing reading and research should be interrupted.  Finally Kate called one night to find Lena gone.  She had taken her trunk and oil-stove and the overworked gas-lamp and had stolen away.  To ferret her out would have been inexcusable.

“It shows how changed she is,” Kate said to Honora.  “Fancy the old-time Lena hiding from me!”

“You must think of her as having a run of fever, Kate.  Whatever she does must be regarded as simply symptomatic,” said Honora, understandingly.  “She’s really half-mad.  David says the graduates are often like that—­the feminine ones.”

Kate tried to look at it in a philosophic way, but her heart yearned and ached over the poor, infatuated fugitive.  The February convocation was drawing near, and with it Lena’s dreaded day of examination.  The night before its occurrence, the conversation at the Caravansary turned to the candidates for the honors.

“There are some who meet the quiz gallantly enough,” David Fulham remarked.  “But the majority certainly come like galley slaves scourged to their dungeon.  Some of them would move a heart of stone with their sufferings.  Honora, why don’t you and Miss Barrington look up your friend Miss Vroom once more?  She’s probably needing you pretty badly.”

“I don’t mind being a special officer, Mr. Fulham,” said Kate, “and it’s my pride and pleasure to make child-beaters tremble and to arrest brawny fathers,—­I make rather a specialty of six-foot ones,—­but really I’m timid about going to Lena’s again.  She has given me to understand that she doesn’t want me around, and I’m not enough of a pachyderm to get in the way of her arrows again.”

But David Fulham couldn’t take that view of it.

“She’s not sane,” he declared.  “Couldn’t be after such a course as she’s been putting herself through.  She needs help.”

However, neither Kate nor Honora ventured to offer it.  They spent the evening together in Honora’s drawing-room.  The hours passed more rapidly than they realized, and at midnight David came stamping in.  His face was white.

“You haven’t been to the laboratory, David?” reproached his wife.  “Really, you mustn’t.  I thought it was agreed between us that we’d act like civilized householders in the evening.”  She was regarding him with an expression of affectionate reproof.

“I’ve been doing laboratory work,” he said shortly, “but it wasn’t in the chemical laboratory.  Wickersham and I hunted up your friend—­and we found her in a state of collapse.”

“No!” cried Kate, starting to her feet.

“I told you, didn’t I?” returned David.  “Don’t I know them, the geese?  We had to break in her door, and there she was sitting at her study-table, staring at her books and seeing nothing.  She couldn’t talk to us—­had a temporary attack of severe aphasia, I suppose.  Wickersham said he’d been anxious about her for weeks—­she’s been specializing with him, you know.”