"My mission class."
"Cut it for once," advised the other calmly.
"Since the class was formed, I've never—"
"But the more reason now. We'll drop in on our way down and get some one to take it."
"Starlight—" the professor began protestingly.
"He'll need exercise now."
That little word, and the emphasis on it, the thought of what it meant, decided him. "I'll just tell Susan," he declared briskly, as he went down the hall.
"Tell her you'll spend the night!"
The professor paused, his hand on the knob of the kitchen door. "I will," he declared, "I will." And he went off as gayly as a boy. He too was a runaway.
But there was a stay-at-home who, as the day wore on and he passed the empty house and repassed it, and went across the quadrangle for a long look at the windows and found them blank, was strangely perturbed. He saw the professor and the young man he had seen with him once or twice before come home from church, no bright young woman jealously guarded between them. He saw them go out alone. But for some tingling memories and some vague fears, he would have gone boldly across and asked for Frances then. But the house looked prim and silent. The curtains of her windows were drawn with exactness, and no white hand stirred them. At evening, going that way purposely, he saw no gleam through the library window or through the transom of the wide hall door. The house was utterly given over to the silence and the dark. This, when he was fierce with heart-hunger to see her, to say a hundred wild things, to touch perhaps the height of the joy of yesterday. By the afternoon of the next day it had grown an impossibility not to know the meaning of this silence.