Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/147

 With a robustness of spirit which had once charmed his cousin in their younger days, he set his face to a new future and a new ideal. She had been but a "half-god" after all. Perhaps some day, when he was rich in academic honours and professorially wise, he would meet such a woman as he had thought her to be—a woman tall and dark and pale whose smile would always be somewhat melancholy and who would see life as the mystery which it was to him. Meanwhile, the year's examinations were approaching, and he knew that he was not prepared to meet them. He drank his bitter tonic and studied doggedly.

He met Conroy in the corridors as often as ever, and saw that the young gentleman's eyes were frequently bloodshot, his colour bad and his manner nervous. Coming out of the college grounds, one April morning, he saw Margaret approaching him at a distance, slowly, and he turned back, wincing, and crossed the campus to another gate. He took a volume of Emerson on his walks, and read under the pines, on the side of one of those north-eastern ravines which the heavy snows had made impassable to him since the early winter. And lying on his back under the branches, he shut his eyes on the light and projected himself upward past the sun and the stars and the entire universe as he conceived it, till these were all flying far below him, like a cloud of glittering insects, in an unceasing and meaningless whirl; and then he turned himself around suddenly on the void of space, and tried to imagine where all these tiny creatures had flown from, where they would alight, from what eggs they had