Courtland was led to go on talking about the old woman, picturing in a few words the room where she lay, the pitifully few comforts, the inch of candle, the tea without sugar or milk, the butterless toast!  He told it quite simply, utterly unaware, that he had told how he had made the toast.  They listened without comment as to one who had been set apart to a duty undesirable but greatly to be admired.  They listened as to one who had passed through a great experience like being shut up in a mine for days, or passing unharmed through a polar expedition or a lonely desert wandering.

Afterward he spoke again about the child, telling briefly how he was killed.  He barely mentioned the sister, and he told nothing whatever of his own part in it all.  They looked at him curiously, as if they would read between the lines, for they saw he was deeply stirred, but they asked nothing.  Presently they all fell to studying, Courtland with the rest, for the morrow’s work was important.

They made him stay on the couch and swung the light around where he could see.  They broke into song or jokes now and then as was their wont, but over it all was a hush and a quiet sympathy that each one felt, and none more deeply than Courtland.  There had never been a time during his college life when he had felt so keenly and so finely bound to his companions as this night; when he went at last to his own room across the hall, he looked about on its comforts and luxuries with a kind of wonder that he had been selected for all this, while that poor woman down in the tenement had to live with bare walls and not even a whole candle!  His pleasant room seemed so satisfying!  And there was that girl alone in her tiny room with so little about her to make life easy, and her beautiful dead lying stricken before her eyes!  He could not get away from the thought of her when he lay down to rest, and in his dreams her face of sorrow haunted him.

It was not until after the examinations the next afternoon that he realized that he was going to her again; had been going all the time, indeed!  Of course he had been but a passing stranger, but she had no one, and he could not let her be in need of a friend.  Perhaps—­Why, he surely had a responsibility for her when he was the only one who had happened by and there was no one else!

She opened the door at his knock and he was startled by the look of her face, so drawn and white, with great dark circles under her eyes.  She had not slept nor wept since he saw her, he felt sure.  How long could human frame endure like that?  The strain was terrible for one so young and frail.  He found himself longing to take her away somewhere out of it all.  Yet, of course, there was nothing he could do.