Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/85

 sterile sciences of the lecture-room—were a study of the dry bones and fossils of a life from which love had departed. Beauty was the face of Love; Truth was the voice of Love. God Himself—and it came to him as a hope which he seized upon as a discovery—was the divine principle of Love which gave a meaning to the universe.

"Aren't your hands cold?" she asked.

"Not very."

"Put one in here," she said, and moved her muff across her knees to him.

He touched her gloved fingers in that warm nest of fur. She smiled. The sunlight swam with a sudden glory of light in the moist happiness that clouded his eyes. And Don-a-Dreams had found himself again in the love dream of youth and the poets.

She had come—like the imaginary playmate who had consoled him for the loss of his picnic on the 24th of May—to companion him in a world that had grown to be a place of doubt and terror to him; and she kept him from the thought of a darkness which he dared not think of. But he did not allow her to make any change in the outward manner of his days. As if he had been a criminal or a conspirator with some secret double life to conceal, he even frequented more than usual any crowded assemblies of the students, and watchfully applauded at the meetings of the debating society, and cheered the assaults at arms in the gymnasium, and listened with a diligent pretence of absorption in the lecture-rooms. Not that