I became aware of the ticking of a great clock in the corner.  My mouth was dry.

“I am going to forgive you,” he went on, more gravely, “for several reasons.  I don’t flatter, as you know.  It’s because you carried out the thing so perfectly that I am led to think you have a gift that may be cultivated, Paret.  You wrote that theme in the way Peters would have written it if he had not been—­what shall I say?—­scripturally inarticulate.  And I trust it may do you some good if I say it was something of a literary achievement, if not a moral one.”

“Thank you, sir,” I faltered.

“Have you ever,” he inquired, lapsing a little into his lecture-room manner, “seriously thought of literature as a career?  Have you ever thought of any career seriously?”

“I once wished to be a writer, sir,” I replied tremulously, but refrained from telling him of my father’s opinion of the profession.  Ambition—­a purer ambition than I had known for years—­leaped within me at his words.  He, Alonzo Cheyne, had detected in me the Promethean fire!

I sat there until ten o’clock talking to the real Mr. Cheyne, a human Mr. Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room.  Nor had I suspected one in whom cynicism and distrust of undergraduates (of my sort) seemed so ingrained, of such idealism.  He did not pour it out in preaching; delicately, unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed to present to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the university held by me and my intimate associates.  After I had left him I walked the quiet streets to behold as through dissolving mists another Harvard, and there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a flame something of the vision later to be immortalized by St. Gaudens, the spirit of Harvard responding to the spirit of the Republic—­to the call of Lincoln, who voiced it.  The place of that bronze at the corner of Boston Common was as yet empty, but I have since stood before it to gaze in wonder at the light shining in darkness on mute, uplifted faces, black faces! at Harvard’s son leading them on that the light might live and prevail.

I, too, longed for a Cause into which I might fling myself, in which I might lose myself...  I halted on the sidewalk to find myself staring from the opposite side of the street at a familiar house, my old landlady’s, Mrs. Bolton’s, and summoned up before me was the tired, smiling face of Hermann Krebs.  Was it because when he had once spoken so crudely of the University I had seen the reflection of her spirit in his eyes?  A light still burned in the extension roof—­Krebs’s light; another shone dimly through the ground glass of the front door.  Obeying a sudden impulse, I crossed the street.

Mrs. Bolton, in the sky-blue wrapper, and looking more forbidding than ever, answered the bell.  Life had taught her to be indifferent to surprises, and it was I who became abruptly embarrassed.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Paret,” she said, as though I had been a frequent caller.  I had never once darkened her threshold since I had left her house.