Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/234

224 of the beauty of the winter in northern Maine, and of the rare characters we had found in Parson Allen and his wife.

But the mischief was done. College boys do not easily lose sight of the clew to a possible joke, and the secret of Jim Ordway's attachment to Maine was the staple of current banter for months. I was not there long to help poor Jim bear and baffle it. In the third week of the term I was called home by the sudden death of my father. His business was left in disastrous confusion, and the only chance of saving the property seemed to lie in my giving up my college education and going into the counting-house. It was a severe test for a boy eighteen years old, but I never regretted that it devolved upon me. I was better suited for a business life than for any other, and the four years of college would not have been sufficient help to me in it to have compensated for the delay. Here, therefore, the currents of life divided me from Jim. After four years—three at school and one at college—in which we had lived like brothers, we were now thrown widely apart.

The separation was much harder to Jim than to me. As I said in the beginning of my story, I have always wondered why I did not love him better. His idealistic, dreamy, poetic, impulsive nature had great fascination for me, but with the fascination was mingled a certain impatience, almost scorn, of his lack of practicality, and an element of pity