"I protest!" he repeated tenaciously. "There is some mistake— some misunderstanding! Even in the two short months Miss Bretton has been with us she has certainly—Certainly——" In a voice as low as a nun's but particularly and peculiarly enunciative he 45 focused suddenly on the President. "The charge is absurd," he said. "It's outrageous! Someone has lied of course! And lied very badly."
With an ill-concealed gesture of exasperation the President straightened up in her chair and glared at her youngest professor.
"I—am the only person—who could have 'lied,'" she affirmed with some hauteur. Slowly into her cold strong-featured face a hot flush ebbed and waned again through lips that crisped a bit round the edges of her words. "If you insist on knowing every detail, Mr. Burnarde," she said, "it was I myself who discovered Miss Bretton! And she was barefooted at the time—and in her nightdress—and clasped most emphatically in the young man's arms."
"What?" cried Burnarde. His very heart seemed to wrench itself loose at the word, but his tight lips bit back the agony into a mere raspishness of astonishment. "What?" Then quite as unexpectedly to himself as to any of the others an amazing little laugh slipped through where even agony could not pass. Oh 46 ye god of Rhetoric! Ye subtlety of Satire! Ye psychology of Climax! Was this the moment when a Master of Arts should fling his tenderest morsel to the dogs? "Betrothal?" Red as blood, white as a lily, the word flashed through his stricken senses! "Betrothal?" Oh ye gods of everything! A betrothal so new, so shy, so sacred, so reverential, that he had not yet even so much as affrighted the cool, unawakened, little-girl finger tips with the thrill of his grown-man lips! A betrothal so new, so shy, so precious, he had not yet even so much as shared the secret with his adorable, patrician mother! Announce it now? Proclaim it now? Merciful God! Was there anything left to proclaim? Yes, that was just exactly the question! Was there anything left to proclaim? Even for loyalty, even in defense of the Beloved who had chosen so garishly—elsewhere, would it greatly enhance a substance as tender as a young girl's honor to scream out now? "I also claimed her—once?" Starkly his fine, clear-cut lips opened and shut again. "I—I protest!" he mumbled. Vaguely in a chaotic blur he sensed a restless exchange of glances, the soft, 47 clothy shifting and stir of busy people impatient to be off. Cleanly and concisely through the blur cut the President's persistent purpose.
"Expulsion, of course," said the President, "must always seem a drastic measure. But in the safety and protection of the greater number rests now as always the greater mercy. This Bretton girl, I understand, has grown up with practically no home surroundings, being shifted about from one boarding school to another ever since her earliest childhood, and knowing apparently very little more about her people than even I have been able to glean. The circumstances are very sad, of course, very unfortunate, but our duty at the moment, of course, concerns itself with results, not causes. Looking back now to her first appearance among us two months ago I realize that there has always been something about her that was vaguely disquieting, vaguely suggestive of lawlessness. Her eyes, perhaps, her hair, some odd little trick of manner. Certainly," quickened the President, "I would not be doing my duty by the hundreds of innocent young girls committed to my care if——"
As though all life reverted then to the mere pursuit of hats and 48 coats and rubbers, the Faculty Meeting dissolved into individual interests again and dispersed as such along the gloomy corridor and down the creaking stairs.
It was winter-cold on the stairs.
Shuffling a little in his overshoes, jerking his coat-collar just a bit tighter around his throat, John Burnarde felt suddenly very old. "Old? Merciful Heavens!" he winced. He was only thirty-five! Did Age come like that to a man in just the time it took him to go up and down the same gray, creaky, familiar stairs? "Apple Blossoms was it that the old Mathematics Professor had said she looked like? But God knew it wasn't just her little face that was Apple Blossomy, but her little mind also, and the little glad gay heart of her! So fresh, so new, so virgin-sweet! By what foul chance, by what incalculable circumstance, had she blundered into this?"
Stripped of passion, stripped even of protest, stripped indeed of every human emotion except his dignity and his pain he pushed 49 his way blindly out through interminable heavy doors and breasted the winter night.
Then quite suddenly, stripped of every emotion except pain, he swung around in his tracks, remounted the stairs, re-entered the President's office, and slamming the door be hind him, flung down even his dignity on the altar of his love.