“I want you to do it, feeling that it is the best—and, indeed, the only way.” The Head spoke with a slow deliberation which carried weight. “You see, Dorothy, you have to think not merely of yourself and your own sense of honour, which is a very fine one; but you have to think also of your father and the effect it might have on him and his career if you withdrew from your position as a candidate now. You know very well how serious it is for a doctor to be talked about in such a way as would inevitably occur if this story became common property. A doctor smirched is a doctor destroyed. We have to be very careful on his account.”
“I know; I had thought about that,” said Dorothy in a curiously muffled tone.
“That is good. Your consideration for him will help you more than anything else.” The Head smiled with such kindly approval that Dorothy was thrilled. “I am not even going to suggest that you may not win the Lamb Bursary; to fail in doing that, through any lack of striving on your part, would be the coward’s way out of a difficulty, and that could never be the right way. Your chance of winning is very good. Rhoda Fleming is your most serious rival. In some ways she has the advantage, because she has been here so much longer that she has been better grounded on our lines of work. On the other hand, you have an advantage over her of steadier application. You keep on keeping on, where she goes slack, and has to pull herself up with extra effort. This may succeed where the struggle is a short one, but will not be of much use in a long strain.”
“I can’t work by starts like that,” said Dorothy. “I should soon get left if I did not keep straight on doing my utmost.”
“It is the only way to real success,” the Head remarked thoughtfully. Then she went on, hesitating a little now, picking her words very carefully, “In the event of your winning, then I should think it best to call the governors of the Bursary together, and make a plain statement of the case to them. If they decided that you were unfit to receive the benefit of the Bursary, the matter could be kept from becoming public. The story about your father need never leak out, and although he would have the pain of knowing all about it, the outside world would not be any the wiser.”
“Oh! it would hurt him so dreadfully to know it was his action which had shut me out from the chance of a university training!” cried Dorothy, shrinking as if the Head had dealt her a blow.
“I know, dear, and it is painful even to think about it. But the governors, taking all things into consideration, may even decide to let you take it, in which case your father may be spared ever hearing of the affair. I cannot think why such a strange provision was put into the rules for enrolment. It might have been that poor Miss Lamb had been compelled to suffer in her time at the hands of some girl whose parent, one or the other, had been in prison, and so it was a case of avenging herself at the expense of the girls who might come after her. Such things do happen. Then, too, it is not as if your father had been in prison from any deliberate attempt at law-breaking. If he had embezzled money—if he had set himself up against what was right and honourable—it would have been a different matter. I think the punishment was far in excess of the wrong-doing, which appears to have begun and ended in an outburst of larkiness and high spirits; but I suppose it was the old woman being hurt which caused the sentence to be imprisonment.”
“Would the governors have the power to set aside that old rule?” asked Dorothy, whose eyes had brightened with a sudden stirring of hope.
“I fancy the governors have all power to do as seems wisest to them,” the Head replied; and then she said, with a low laugh, “As they are men, it would be no question of their sense of honour being shaky.”
Dorothy gave a start of pure amazement at such an utterance from the Head; she was even bold enough to ask, “Do you think that women are less honourable than men?”