It was pleasant to lie there in that warm, comfortable room with the familiar sights all around, the pennants, the pictures, the wild arrangements of photographs and trophies, and hear the fellows talking of homely things; to be fed with food that made him begin to feel like himself again; to have their kindly fellowship all about him like a protection.

They were grand fellows, each one of them; full of faults, too, but true at heart.  Life-friends he knew, for there was a cord binding their four hearts together with a little tenderer tie than bound them to any of the other fellows.  They had been together all the four years, and if all went well, and Bill Ward didn’t flunk anything more, they would all four go out into the world as men together at the end of that year.

He lay looking at them quietly as they talked, telling little foolish jokes, laughing immoderately, asking one another anxiously about a tough question in the exam. that morning, and what the prospects were for good marks for them all.  It was all so familiar and beloved!  So different from those last three hours amid suffering and sorrow!  It was all so natural and happy, as if there were no sorrow in the world.  As if this life would never end!  But he hadn’t yet got over that feeling of the Presence in the room with them, standing somewhere behind Pat and Tennelly.  He liked to feel the consciousness of it in the back of his mind.  What would the fellows say if he should try to tell them about it?  They would think he was crazy.  He had a feeling that he would like to be the means of making them understand.

He told them gradually about Wittemore; not as he might have told them directly after seeing him off, nor quite as he had expected to tell them.  It was a little more full; it gave them a little kinder, keener insight into a character that they had hitherto almost entirely condemned and ignored.  They did not laugh!  It was a revelation to them.  They listened with respect for the student who had gone to his mother’s dying bed.  They had all been long enough away from their own mothers to have come to feel the worth of a mother quite touchingly.  Moreover, they perceived that Courtland had seen more in Wittemore than they had ever seen.  He had a side, it appeared, that was wholly unselfish, almost heroic in a way.  They had never suspected him of it before.  His long, horse-like face, with the little light china-blue eyes always anxious and startled, appeared to their imaginations with a new appeal.  When he returned they would be kinder to him.

“Poor old Abner!” said Tennelly, thoughtfully.  “Who would have thought it!  Carrying medicine to an old bedridden crone!  And was going to stick to his job even when his mother was dying!  He’s got some stuff in him, after all, if he hasn’t much sense!”