“Try to keep a measure of decorum, Dr. Knowles,” the dean said finally, sending a loud, agonized breath my way. She stood up and I followed suit.

I wondered who shared a birthday with Dean Underwood. Someone with no sense of humor, I supposed.

On the way to my Ford Fusion, I thought of several brilliant responses I should have made to the dean’s reprimand. For one thing, I wished I’d invited her to the August seventeenth party, for Pierre de Fermat’s birthday. My math majors were preparing a skit about Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he had declared “remarkable,” but never proved. I’d been warned by my students that there was a limerick involved in their interpretation.

I knew I should have been relieved that I hadn’t crossed the line into sarcasm the dean might recognize. After all, my ranking was at stake. Still, it would have been fun to tell her she didn’t have to bring a present for Fermat. He wouldn’t be showing up.

I’d also neglected to mention to the dean that the next party wasn’t that far off. Tomorrow, in fact, the four Franklin Hall departments would be celebrating a brand new doctoral degree. Hal Bartholomew, the students’ favorite physics instructor, had completed all the requirements and would graduate at the end of the year from Massachusetts University.

It was common knowledge that Hal’s thesis had been rejected twice before by MU’s faculty committee. He’d been burdened with an uncooperative crystal to study and had had difficulty acquiring spectral data. He was also balancing his research time with his full teaching load and family life.

As I understood it, delays in collecting data occurred often to those in experimental physics. And anyone who’d ever been in grad school in any field sympathized with the setbacks on the way to an advanced degree.

Anyone except Keith Appleton, that is.

Keith took every opportunity to make a snide remark about Hal’s struggle. I’d never forget his comment when Hal sneezed at Henley’s baccalaureate dinner in June.