Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/285

 With the bestowal of the impersonally broadcasted degree, Columbia had dropped him as unceremoniously as it had failed to welcome him when he arrived—"and quite right, too," thought Neale. He detested the florid sentimentality of some other universities, the maudlin old grads singing of bright college years!

So he knew nothing whatever about Columbia to report. Besides, Professor Wentworth naturally enough was inquiring about what had been happening to the faculty during his absence, and Neale had never had the faintest guess that any of his professors led a three-dimensional life. But most of all, his year in business, in an office surrounded by men who had never been near a university had set him immeasurably far from the academic world. In an attempt to satisfy Martha's father he now made a great effort to look back at college life, but he was looking back at it from the wrong end of a telescope. It was inconceivably small and far away. He had not realized till now how much the year in business had changed him, how rapidly he had left behind him the horizon of his college years. Well, that was as it should be—to live hard in the present without brooding over the past or dreaming of the future.…

Then Martha came in, and he forgot college altogether, forgot Professor Wentworth, he even forgot the business world as he looked half-shyly, half-confidently into her blue eyes—the same, but, oh, how startlingly more real and alive than the dream-like memory picture he had been treasuring all those months.

They crossed the ferry, they stepped off briskly up the zigzag path, then when the last house was hidden behind the rocks, they stopped. Martha lifted her smiling face to his. As their lips touched, Neale was thrilled by a wave of emotion,—exaltation rather than passion. "How dear, how sweet, how incredibly pure and good she was!"

The moment passed; as they walked on from time to time their eyes met frankly. "Oh, but I'm glad to be walking with you again, Neale," said Martha at last. "It's as if we