“I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay.”  Again the younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it unchallenged.

The professor rose to his feet.  “Good night,” he said; “unless you will go back with me.  Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep.”  He had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare ourselves and one another.

    “‘Where the love light never, never dies,’”

The boy’s voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds.  Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country.  He could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections as slight—­Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window.  Such the easy proficiency of affection.

Attention to the lad’s singing suddenly was lifted above the subconscious.  The simple melody had entangled itself in some forgotten association of the professor’s boyhood, seeking to marshal which before him, he received the full force of the single line sung in direct ear-shot.  Like the tune, the words also became a challenge; pricked through the unregarded heaviness in which he was plying his familiar task, and demanded that he should name its cause.

For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long!  No, not dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic.  Burnt down, smoldered; suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace.  There was a touch of contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned back to his work.  And yet, he stopped a moment longer to think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best achievement!

The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over which he had spent his evenings for more than a week.  Most of them had been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation here and there which had made his progress slow.  He examined a half-dozen more, and then in sheer mental revolt against the subject, slipped them under the rubber bands with others of their kind and dropped the neat packages out of his sight into one of the drawers of the desk.  Wayland’s book on Greece, the fruit of eighteen months’ sojourn there, had come through the mail on the same day when the calculus papers had been handed in, and he had read it through at once, not to be teased intolerably by its invitation.  He had mastered the text, avid through the long winter night, but he picked it up again now, and for a little while studied the sumptuous illustrations.  How long Wayland had been away from Vaucluse, how much of enrichment had come to him in the years since he had left!  He himself might have gone also, to larger opportunities—­he had chosen to remain, held by a sentiment!  The professor closed the book with a little sigh, and taking it to a small shelf on the opposite side of the room, stood it with a half-dozen others worthy of such association.