The driver vanished and the carriage started at a rapid pace.  Courtland sat supporting his silent charge in growing alarm, alternately chafing her hands and trying to force more brandy between her set lips.  He was relieved when at last the carriage stopped again and he recognized the stone buildings of one of the city’s great hospitals.

CHAPTER IX

When Courtland got back to the university the afternoon examination had been in progress almost half an hour.  With a brief explanation to the professor, he settled to his belated work regardless of Bill Ward’s anxious glances from the back of the room and Pat’s lifted eyebrows from the other side.  He knew he had yet to meet those three beloved antagonists.  He seemed to have progressed through eons of experience since he talked with them last night.  The intricate questions of the examination on political science over which he was trying faithfully to work seemed paltry beside the great facts of life and death.

He had remained at the hospital until the girl came out of her long swoon and the doctor said she was better, but the thought of her white face was continually before him.  When he closed his eyes for a moment to think how to phrase some answer in his paper he would see that still, beautiful face as it lay on his shoulder in the carriage.  It had filled him with awe to think that he, a stranger, was her only friend in that great city, and she might be dying!  Somehow he could not cast her off as a common stranger.

He had arranged that she should be placed in a small private room at a moderate cost, and paid for a week in advance.  The cost was a mere trifle to Courtland.  The new overcoat he had meant to buy this week would more than cover the cost.  Besides, if he needed more than his ample allowance his father was always quite ready to advance what he wanted.  But the strange thing about all this was that, having paid to put the girl where she would be perfectly comfortable and be well taken care of, he could not cast her off and forget her.  His responsibility seemed to be doubled with everything he did for her.  Between the problems of deep state perplexities and intrigues was ever the perplexity about that girl and how she was going to live all alone with her tragedy—­or tragedies—­for it was apparent from the little hints she had dropped that the death of the small brother was only the climax of quite a series of sorrows that had come to her young life.  And yet she, with all that sorrow compassing her about, could still believe in the Christ and call upon Him in her trouble!  There was a kind of triumphant feeling in his heart when he reached that conclusion.

He lay on the couch in Tennelly’s room that night after supper and tried to think it out, while the other three clattered away about their marks and held an indignation meeting over the way Pat was getting black-listed by all the professors just when he was trying so hard.  He didn’t know the fellows were keeping it up to get his mind away from the funeral.  He was thinking about that girl.