“I’ll not try to change him,” said Billy grimly.  “I’ll tell him what I think of him, though.”

They paused by the gate.  Billy looked down at Lydia with a puzzled frown.

“How about ‘Ducit Amor Patriae’ now, Lydia?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighed.  “Good night, Billy.”

“Good-by, Lydia,” said the young man heavily and he turned away, leaving her standing at the gate.

But though she had maintained a calm front with Billy, Lydia went over and over their conversation that night feverishly before she went to sleep.  She tossed and turned and then long after the old livingroom clock had struck midnight, she slipped out of bed and crouched on her knees, her hands clasped across her pillow, her eyes on the quiet stars that glowed through the window.

“O God,” she prayed, “O God, if You do exist, help me now!  Don’t let me lose Billy’s respect for I don’t know how I can get along without it.  God!  God!  Make me believe in You, for I must have Some One to turn to!  You have taken mother and little Patience and John Levine from me!  Oh, let me keep Billy!  Let me keep him, God, and make me strong enough to keep on accepting that three hundred and twenty acres.  Amen.”

Shivering, but somehow quieted, she crept into bed and fell asleep.

CHAPTER XX

THE YOUNGEST SCHOLAR

“The Indians knew no home, and so they died.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

If Amos was not happy after Lydia’s concession, at least she never had seen him so interested in life as he was now.  Nor had Kent ever been more considerate of Lydia.  They went to a number of dances and skated together frequently in spite of the fact that Kent was very busy with his real estate work.

All this, Lydia told herself, should have made her happy, and yet, she was not.  Even when Professor Willis took her to a Military hop and brought her home in a hack, she was conscious of the feverish sense of loss and uncertainty that had become a part of her daily living.  Several times she had an almost overwhelming desire to tell him what she had done.  But she could not bear to destroy the ideal she knew he had of her, even for the relief of receiving his sympathy, of which she was very sure.

Billy came to see her as usual, and took her to an occasional dance.  But he was not the friend of old.  And the change was not in any neglect of things done, it was in his way of looking at her; in his long silences when he studied her face with a grieved, puzzled look that made her frantic; in his ceasing to talk over his work with her with any air of comradeship, and most of all in his ceasing to bully her—­that inalienable earmark of the attitude of the lover toward the beloved.

Lydia’s nerves began to feel the strain before spring came in.  She was pale in the morning and fever-flushed in the afternoon and her hands were uncertain.  March was long and bleak, that year, but April came in as sweetly as a silver bugle call.  The first week in April the ice went out of the lake with a crash and boom and mighty upheaval, leaving a pellucid calm of blue waters that brought a new light to Lydia’s face.  She heard the first robin call on her way home from college, the day that the ice went out.