“Oh, I suppose so!  Yes, yes!”

“But don’t—­don’t you want to have people like you and be your friend?”

“My dear young lady, it is not a question of what I want.  I was not put here in the world to frivol through a life of gross pleasure.  I have serious work to do in the service of humankind, and I can do it only by rigid concentration and ruthless elimination of the unessential.  Surely you can grasp that?”

“But—­if you died to-morrow,” said Fifi, fearfully fascinated by this aspect of the young man’s majestic isolation,—­“don’t you know of anybody who’d be really and truly sorry?”

“Really, I’ve never thought of it, but doubtless my two friends in New York would be sorry after their fashion.  They, I believe, are all.”

“No they aren’t!  There’s somebody else!”

Queed supposed she was going to say God, but he dutifully inquired, “Who?”

Fifi looked decidedly disappointed.  “I thought you knew,” she said, gazing at him with childlike directness.  “Me.”

Queed’s eyes fell.  There was a brief silence.  The young man became aware of a curious sensation in his chest which he did not understand in the least, but which he was not prepared to describe as objectionable.  To pass over it, and to bring the conversation to an immediate close, he rapped the open book austerely with his pencil.

“We must proceed with the difficulties.  Let me hear you try the passage.  Come! Quam ob rem, Quirites....”

The nine o’clock difficulties proceeded with, and duly cleared up, Fifi did not stay for the second, or 9.45, interlude.  She closed M.T.  Ciceronis Orationes Selectae, gathered together her other paraphernalia, and then she said suddenly:—­

“I may leave school next week, Mr. Queed.  I—­don’t think I’m going to graduate.”

He looked up, surprised and displeased.  “Why on earth do you think that?”

“Well, you see, they don’t think I’m strong enough to keep up the work right now.  The Doctor was here to-day, and that’s what he says.  It’s silly, I think—­I know I am.”

Queed was playing the devil’s tattoo with his pencil, scowling somewhat nervously.  “Did you want to graduate particularly?”

A look of exquisite wistfulness swept the child’s face, and was gone.  “Yes, I wanted to—­lots.  But I won’t mind so much after I’ve had time to get used to it.  You know the way people are.”

There was a silence, during which the young man wrestled with the sudden mad idea of offering to help Fifi with all her lessons each night—­not merely with the difficulties—­thus enabling her to keep up with her class with a minimum of work.  Where such an impulse came from he could not conjecture.  He put it down with a stern hand.  Personally, he felt, he might be almost willing to make this splendid display of altruism; but for the sake of posterity and the common good, he could not dream of stealing so much time from the Magnum Opus.