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“What y’ goin’ t’ do here, or are y’ goin’ t’ take the girl away with yeh?”

“She can’t leave her mother. We’ll run this boarding-house for the present. I’ll try for the principalship of the school here. Raff is going to resign, they say. If I can’t get that, I’ll go into a law office. Don’t worry about me.”

“But why go into this so quick? Why not put it off fifteen or twenty years?” asked Hartley, trying to get back to cheerful voice.

“What would be the use? At the end of a year I’d be just about as poor as I am now.”

“Can’t y’r father step in and help you?”

“No. There are three boys and two girls, all younger than I, to be looked out for, and he has all he can carry. Besides, she needs me right here and right now, and if I can do anything to make life easier for her I’m going t’ do it. Besides,” he ended, in a peculiar tone, “we don’t feel as if we could live apart much longer.”

“But, great Scott! man, you can’t–“

“Now, hold on, Jim! I’ve thought this thing all over, and I’ve made up my mind. It ain’t any use to go on talking about it. What good would it do me to go to school another year? I’d come out without a dollar, and no more fitted for earning a living for her than I am now! And, besides all that, I couldn’t draw a free breath thinking of her workin’ away here to keep things moving, liable at any minute to break down.”

Hartley gazed at him in despair, and with something like awe. It was a tremendous transformation in the young, ambitious student.

Like most men in America, and especially Western men, he still clung to the idea that a man was entirely responsible for his success or failure in life. He had not admitted that conditions of society might be so adverse that only men of most exceptional endowments, and willing and able to master many of the best and deepest and most sacred of their inspirations and impulses, could succeed.

Of the score of specially promising young fellows who had been with him at school, seventeen had dropped out and down. Most of them had married and gone back to farming, or to earn a precarious living in the small, dull towns where farmers trade and traders farm. Conditions were too adverse; they simply weakened and slipped slowly back into dulness and an ox-like or else a fretful patience. Thinking of these men, and thinking their failure due to themselves alone, Hartley could not endure the idea of his friend adding one more to the list of failures. He sprang up at last.

“Say, Bert, you might just as well hang y’rself, and done with it! Why, it’s suicide! I can’t allow it. I started in at college bravely, and failed because I’d let it go too long. I couldn’t study–couldn’t get down to it; but you–why, old man, I’d bet on you!” He had a tremor in his voice. “I hate like thunder to see you give up your plans. Say, you can’t afford to do this; it’s too much to pay.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I say it is–and, besides, you’d get over this in a week–“

“Jim!” called Albert, warningly, sharply.

“All right,” said Jim, in the tone of a man who knows it’s all wrong–“all right; but the time ‘ll come when you’ll wish I’d–You ain’t doin’ the girl enough good to make up for the harm you’re doin’ yourself.” He broke off again, and said in a tone of finality: “I’m done. I’m all through, and I c’n see you’re through with Jim Hartley. All right!”

“Darn curious,” he muttered to himself, “that boy should get caught just at this time, and not with some o’ those girls in Marion. Well, it’s none o’ my funeral,” he ended, with a sigh; for it had stirred him to the bottom of his sunny nature, after all. A dozen times, as he lay there beside his equally sleepless companion, he started to say something more in deprecation of the step, but each time stifled the opening word into a groan.