had died. Remember me to your aunt. I have asked Margaret not to write. I know you will be a sensible boy and understand."
He read it a second time, with the face of a bankrupt. Then he put it away quietly, and returned to his mathematics. At ten o'clock he took it out again, and slowly tore it to pieces, his lips shut thin and tight.
And Donald was no longer a boy.
He was no longer a boy; and for the time he was no longer a lover. It was as if, having eaten a sickly-sweet Eastern poison, he had come out of dreams and delirium weak and shaken; and the mere thought of the girl gave him an almost physical sensation of empty nausea that sent him, hungrily, to his work. He avoided the books, the walks and the associations that might remind him of her. He grappled with his mathematics in a renewal of mind that rejoiced in its own keenness. He avoided even solitude—except the busy solitude of his studies—and returned to the wholesome companionship of his cousin without any reference to what had separated them. His father, secretly proud of the unexpected determination and independence which his son had shown, watched him in a silence that gave consent to the boy's ambition, but held aloof in a desire to confirm this new strength of spirit by doing nothing to prop it.
It was his mother who gave him word that he would be allowed to go to college, and be maintained there as long as he passed the examinations in his
