"After all, since it is over, I won't be unkind. Good-bye. We've had a pleasant semester, haven't we?" and this time she gave him her hand.

A girl raised one of the hallway curtains just then. The sudden flash of light came upon Katharine where she stood with her hand in Pellams'. She had meant that look, that softening of the eyes, that little quiver of the mouth, for darkness and concealment, and he caught it all before she could blot it out with a smile.

And, having argued to a conclusion, it mattered not to either that Miss Meiggs stood looking out at them with supreme contempt.



AN ALUMNI DINNER.



An Alumni Dinner.

"And it's we who have to rustle In the cold, cold world!"

Dr. Williamson's landlady would not listen any further. She stood on the threshold of her lodger's combination of bedroom and office and said, with an offensively clear enunciation:

"You haven't any patients, and no more have I any longer, and I want that money to-morrow or I rent the room."

The door closed.

Williamson listened to her footsteps, as hard and uncompromising as her voice, and when they had ceased he got up from his chair, a despairing soul. After all, this was the rope's end. He would have to own up to a failure.

If Williamson had been a man of more force he would not have acknowledged so much, perhaps; but he had been conscientious and faithful to the limit of his understanding, patient to the verge of philosophy, and the result discouraged him.

He drew out his last clean collar and put it on, with the vague idea of going somewhere and doing something—what, he could not have told. His eyes fell on a framed document hanging near his mirror, a small but ornate instrument, setting forth that the Faculty and Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, by virtue of the authority in them vested, etc., conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry on Philip Howard Williamson.

His thoughts turned back toward a morning over four years gone, when he walked down the platform bearing that "last of his childhood's toys," and in imagination P.H. Williamson, M. D., held conversation with Philip Howard Williamson, A. B.

Williamson, A. B., standing just the other side of the mirror, spoke and said:

"It looks as though you were up against it."

Williamson, M. D., arranging his tie so as to hide his soiled shirt, answered:

"I am up against it. And it's your fault."

Williamson, A. B., did not seem to see it. But he was a conceited creature, anyway.

"It's more than half your fault," went on the man on the real side of the mirror. "You dug and worked, and you thought that if you only kept ahead of your class in Physiology you had a clean card to success. How many fellows did you know in college?"

"Some. I never went in for being popular. There were Trueman, and Miller, and Rodney—"

"And how many of them were of the sort to help you? Trueman, without family or brains, and Miller, who lived in the East, and little Rod—"

"They were the best I could meet. They were the only ones who understood that I really wanted people. No one understood how I loved the college and wanted to be in things. I wasn't good at telling; and besides, I had my work to do. They knew the way I used to look across the campus on Spring nights—"

Williamson, M. D., checked him at this point. That impractical creature thought that they were talking of friendship, when it was only a question of Pull. He conveyed that point to the Bachelor.

"Why didn't you find some friends who would be of use to Me?" he asked, savagely. "While you were following out sutures and involuntary reactions, what was Marshall doing? Running for class president and making the Mandolin Club and getting acquainted with people of some use to him. He isn't one-two-six with me for ability and never was; but he has patients to give away, and I—"

Williamson, A. B., came to bat.

"You do mightily well to reproach me with all this. How have you done in making friends? Did you work up any connections at Columbia those three years? Have you tried to find anyone here in town? What friends have you except Stanford men? What have you done for yourself, anyway?"

The other weakly quoted what the Head Demonstrator had said of his surgery.

Williamson, A. B., held him to the point: "I also was called the keenest student of my time," said he; "but it isn't bringing you patients."

The M. D. broke sullenly away, leaving the A. B. frowning back of the mirror. These dead selves are so crude! He ended the interview by slamming out of the house.

For the twentieth time that week he cast up accounts with himself, as the electric car sped toward civilization. Assets, one dollar and five cents, just reduced by a grinding monopoly from a dollar-ten; liabilities, a laundry bill and six weeks' rent. Truly, a squalid failure. If he could only hold out a little longer! There was in sight a situation as consulting physician to a lodge in his father's Order, which would mean a living at least. He had the promise of it in a month's time. A loan of twenty-five dollars now would save him, but no good angel occurred to him, think as he might, and he had nothing he could afford to pawn.

Troubled in spirit, he sauntered listlessly up Post street from Kearny. The mid-day rain had not yet dried from the pavements, and the air was clear and fresh. Against the last of a January sunset, the tops of the city were growing indistinct. The personnel of the crowd on the streets had changed; the promenaders and the cocktail-route procession had dwindled to a few stragglers. There was less of a press now, and most of the people were of the class that work until six, belated bookkeepers and girls from shops and sewing rooms. He watched these toilers with a vague feeling of envy; he dragged the feeling to the light and found that he was coveting the day's work just passed. What would not he have given to be tired at the end of a day of profitable toil? It was the hour when comfortable people sit down to dinner.

In front of an art store he saw Lincoln, the Chronicle man, idly studying the pictures. Williamson had known him as well as he had known any man at Palo Alto, but he walked by without a word, feeling in no mood for companionship. A few steps further he turned, and went back and stood behind his friend.

"Hello, Phil!" said Lincoln, in cheery surprise. "Well, you are a stranger! Been keeping pretty close to your office, haven't you?"

"Yes," answered Williamson, without going into particulars.

"I haven't happened to get a detail out in your direction and my health has been unfortunately good, so I haven't seen you for moons, not since the night at the Zink, last Thanksgiving."

"You newspaper men see more of the fellows than a man in my profession can hope to do," said the physician. "It isn't ethics for me to hunt them up, you know."

"How is the practice, so far?"

"Well," answered Williamson, hiding the bitterness of it with a laugh; "the practice is about all I have got out of it."

"Not so bad as that, I'll bet," protested Lincoln. "Are you going down for Commencement, or the Ball, or anything?"

"No, I shan't be able to get down," answered the other, turning in his fingers the lonely dollar in his pocket. "That's the worst of the medical profession," he added, equivocally.

His thoughts came fast as they stood there in the fading daylight before the picture-shop. It was entirely probable that Lincoln would lend him the money he needed, and would lend it gladly. Their college friendship had been sincere, and a few years do not change a thing like that. He knew that the man had a good position on the Chronicle and that he saved a large portion of his money—he had been economical at the University. Fortune could never smile upon Lincoln sufficiently to work any material change in his dress; he had always looked like a pauper; to-day, poverty showed in the journalist rather than in the carefully-dressed physician.

Williamson's heart grew lighter. This Stanford man, rising before him in his hour of desperation, should tide him over his temporary trouble. Of all the men at the University there had been none who had spoken so often and so sincerely of the Stanford spirit as Lincoln. Here was a chance to put it to a test. He knew his man. Williamson felt himself filled with a faith in Divine Providence.

But it was not easy to ask the loan. To suggest such a thing is less difficult to some people than to others. To Williamson it was anything but a simple thing. He could never broach the subject there on the sidewalk. The matter must be led up to in some way; to brace in cold blood was impossible. He moved his fingers in nervous irresolution, and the dollar touched them significantly.

"Say, Lew, let's not stand here all night; come to dinner with me, can't you? We'll have a good Alumni chat; we don't bump into each other very often."

He felt horribly hypocritical, yet this was the only way.

"You haven't had dinner, have you?" he went on, when Lincoln hesitated a bit.

"No. I'll be glad to, thank you, Phil. Where do you go?"

"Let's try Sanguinetti's for the fun of the thing. We can talk down there, and it won't break us, either."

They found a corner table in the restaurant. The room wore the quiet look of Monday evening, the calm that follows the storm of Sunday, when the place rocks with post-picnic revelry. A squat negro, perched on the edge of a serving-table by the wall, sang vociferously to a resonant banjo. Now and then a party of swarthy Latins joined in mildly when the selections incurred their favor.

The two college men found it easy chatting. Williamson's dollar had brought a very good dinner, particularly the chicken and the tortillas; the claret was abundant and not half bad when jollied with seltzer. He was trusting to Lincoln for tobacco.

Still the physician could not bring himself to the point toward which the dinner was intended to smooth the road. The "Dago red" had mellowed them both and they talked merrily of the days at Palo Alto, bringing up one good memory after another, drifting gradually to an exchange of Alumni personals of which the newspaper man furnished the larger part. They talked of the men their young University had sent into the distant parts of the world, youngsters running mines in the Antipodes, with fat salaries to keep up their courage; of the little Stanford colony in Western Australia and the Pioneers in China. There were a good many for so new a college. Then there were the commonplaces who were doing well at home. The thought of bringing the serious side of his own case into this chat gave Williamson a chill. It was a foolish bit of pride, but it was getting harder every minute to down it. He deftly turned the subject his way.

"It isn't all prosperity, though. I've noticed that some of them seem to be up against it lately—just hard luck stories, I suppose. There's Rawdon, for example."

Lincoln leaned back comfortably in his chair.

"Let me tell you a case that has come under my notice lately and see what you think of it," he said. "I won't mention names, but it's about a man we both knew at College. He had a place on the paper, the Chronicle, and during the political season did very well; after that there came a slump and the city editor let him out; the other papers had no room for him, of course—they were dropping men—and he couldn't get a thing of any sort to do, though he rustled hard. You know Coles and Harrison, the boys call them the Stanford Employment Bureau, they have found quite a number of places for the fellows; but this particular man was evidently up against it, and there wasn't the smallest symptom of a job. He managed to get something in the Sunday supps, but barely enough to keep him alive, and nothing certain. Meanwhile he pawned his things gradually and grew pretty well discouraged. I remember I heard him say once, and his laugh covered more than I guessed at the time, that Jewish holidays ought to be prohibited by state law, since closed doors under the three balls meant some Stanford man's going hungry. He got down to bedrock and finally reached the point where he had gone without three successive meals. Pretty rough, wasn't it?"

"I should say so," answered Williamson. His own distress was trivial beside a trouble like this.

Lincoln fed the alcohol flame burning around the omelet just brought them.

"It seems to me," he went on, "that there is a case in which a man is justified in asking help; he ought to ask it long before he gets to such a pass as that; if he lets his pride prevent him it's his own fault. We certainly have carried away from the University something of the spirit we learned there. I know for my part that such a man has a claim on whatever help I can give him, and as a Stanford man he has a right to seek it. Don't you agree with me?"

Williamson had been waiting through the course of the dinner for a chance to advance an identical theory. He could not have hoped for a better opening.

"Indeed I do," he said. "You have the old Stanford spirit as strong as ever, haven't you, Lew? Now I want to tell you a story."

At a table near them a woman who looked as though she had a history, one that dated far back at that, began to sing—one of those ballads about home and the wandering boy. The two men tipped back in their chairs and listened to the song. Williamson was planning what he should say as soon as it was ended. It would be better to tell the whole thing.

During the applause that followed, Lincoln dropped his cigarette into his coffee cup and started to speak. Williamson, unwilling that another subject should follow the last words they had exchanged, interrupted him.

"I have a story, too, Lew, and it's about myself. I don't doubt this is rather a surprise to you," he went on, noticing the look on the other's face, "although you know the way of the young physician is hard. The fact is, I have got to the point where I must get a little temporary lift or give up the struggle for a while, and I can't bear the thought of that."

Then he went on swiftly, ignoring his friend's attempts at interruption, until he had told the whole story of his uphill work and his defeat.

"You asked me just now, Lew, if I didn't think one Stanford man should help another who really needed help, if he could. I put up my last coin for an opportunity to ask you the same question, but with a different purpose."

Lincoln's eyes were moist as he reached across the table and grasped Williamson's hand.

"I think you know me well enough, old man, to know my answer to that question. But you did not let me finish my story. You see, I—er—I'm the man I was telling you about."



BOGGS' ELECTION FEED.



Boggs' Election Feed.

"Oh think what anxious moments pass between The birth of plots and their last fatal periods!"

ADDISON.

It would never have happened if Boggs hadn't dropped in on Jimmy Mason and Pellams when they were cramming for an examination, for, although Pellams had long "kept an axe" for Boggs, he needed the inspiration of the moment to swing it like this. It was always so with Pellams' best things.

The inspiration in this case came one evening when he and Jimmy were doing genuine work. People who have seen it declare that the spectacle of Mason cramming for an examination was one of the show sights of the University. He generally let things go until the last day of grace; then with sundry fellow-victims and a motley collection of notes, syllabi, books, reports—anything on the subject—gathered on the green cloth of his table, he would start in. Raps might come from time to time on the locked door; Jimmy would hold up a warning finger for silence, while the outsider shot through the keyhole such remarks as "Jimmy Mason, loosen up. You've mixed my clothes again;" or, "Hi, Jimmy! give me the markings;" or, possibly, hurled a mass of unrepeatable terms at the unresponsive door. Perhaps his roommate, Marion, would come in when the lights went out; then Jimmy would call a breathing-spell, during which, while "Nosey" went to bed behind the portieres, he drew his lamp from its hiding-place and made strong coffee in the coffee-pot or chafing-dish, whichever had been washed the more recently. Somewhere in the small hours the seminary would adjourn with "international complications," "tendencies of the age," "sub-head B," heating their brains. Out of bed at seven for a final swift review of the subject, Mason would sail over to class with a great unbreakfasted hollow beneath his sweater, to pass freely and gloriously, and to forget the whole mess by the time he had finished his afternoon nap.

And to see Jimmy in the seminary itself! How masterfully he kept track of headings, sub-headings and modifying circumstances! How he could scent at a day's distance the things which the professor was going to ask, as well as those he was going to skip! When he said, "Now, old Morton is heavy on this," the seminary digested the subject in all its bearings and ramifications; and when he said, "No use looking that up," they skipped the heading, though pages of syllabi were slighted thereby. When the wandering mind of Pellams slid off the work, it was beautiful to see Jimmy lead it back with a word and a look; when he sent some sleepy Senior to bed with the remark, "You're no more good. Sleep it off and be fresh to-morrow," Jimmy touched the sublime.

The glory of it all was that upper-classmen as well as Freshmen put themselves absolutely under the Sophomore's rule when it was a question of an examination. Thus does the elective system level all ranks and give genius opportunity.

On the night that Boggs dropped in on them, Jimmy and Pellams were cramming alone. Two seniors who were usually in the group had gone somewhere to mix up in a complication over Student-Body treasurer. A Junior seldom out of line was a candidate for the Executive Committee; he had put his head in at the door to say, "Dead sorry, fellows, but can't get in it," and then gone down to Palo Alto to make himself agreeable to a dig girl who had "influence." The popularity of some people waxes strangely the latter part of April. A Freshman who was taking the course when he shouldn't and who stood on the dizzy brink of flunking it, had gone off with a Junior who wanted to stand well with certain Freshmen of importance, and who had overjoyed the youngster with an invitation to Mayfield, an event which made flunking clear out of the University a thing of small moment to the Freshman's mind.

Pellams alone showed up. He was not in politics; further, he knew the value to himself of these evenings with Jimmy; not that the syllabi made much impression on him, but he carried enough to class next day to shadow forth an apparent knowledge of the subject. This he supplemented with two or three original reflections that interested the instructor and slipped him through. It was these flashes of intelligence that made him worth the labor to Mason. Sometimes he could set the whole seminary right on an obscure phrase; this made up for an hour of imperfect attention.

To-night the two men were hard at it. They sat at opposite sides of the table, the electric drop-light illuminating the papers between them.

"Say," said Pellams, "Bob Duncan's the luckiest baby in the bunch. He doesn't know as much about this course as I do, and he's got appendicitis, the doctor says—no fake."

"Now, Pellams," said Mason seriously, "you have to remember Cromwell. He did all this in sub-headings four to eleven. You've placed him, haven't you?"

"The guy that made them keep the powder dry?"

"The minister Cromwell; you remember him—the one who was bald."

Jimmy had learned that Pellams needed a concrete peg on which to hang his memories.

"Oh, sure, I've got him; that throw-away-ambition boy. Hadn't a hair between him and heaven."

A knock came at the door.

"That's it. Sh—sh!"

"Let me in, Jimmy." The room was still.

"I know you and Pellams are digging. I won't say a word to either of you, only give me a smoke."

"Haven't any," said Jimmy, rapidly transferring a sack of Durham and a package of papers from the table.

"Well, let me in, anyway. I want to read by your lamp. Oh, say, open up!"

"It's Boggs. If we don't let him in he'll stand and plead in outer darkness all night."

The door rattled. Jimmy howled "Ye-e-es!" in a tone of provoked affirmative, and Boggs was opened unto.

It would be hard to tell in what way Boggs did not block the seminary. He found the tobacco by invading Jimmy's sacred drawer during an absorbing discussion on land tenure; then he rolled and consumed exactly fourteen cigarettes. Pellams kept count out of the corner of his eye. Boggs was making smoke in the sunshine of free tobacco. He put his feet on Mason's laundry packages, freshly stacked in the corner. He broke his word by talking politics steadily, and finally, when he drew out of the room just ahead of ten-thirty lights, a double sigh of relief went up from the crammers.

"That article needs fixing," said Pellams, meditatively, as Jimmy got out the chafing-dish and prepared the black coffee that makes additional pages of syllabi possible before sleep comes.

"I wonder," said Jimmy, "if he ever bought an ounce of tobacco since he came here. He's smoked mine every time he could find it since I've been in college. I remember," here Jimmy stopped to laugh, "that when I was a Freshmen—you'll bear witness I was a fresh one, too—I used to be pleased clear to the red at getting all that attention from an upper-classman. The satisfaction cost me a good many pounds of tobacco, though."

"His opinion of himself politically is what kills me. Lyman is his ideal. He loafs in Frank's room until Frank has had to give up smoking. It's fun to see him. I was in there the other night. 'How are you going to stand on the election, Frank?' says Boggsie, as though it were a conference of the powers. 'Oh, I think Higgins is pretty good,' says Frank; 'what do you think?' Not that he gave a whoop; he was trying to be polite. 'Well, I may use my influence for Castleton,' says Boggsie, with his pet air of mystery. His influence consists of his roommate. 'The deuce you will!' says Frank, with sarcasm. All wasted though, for Boggsie fairly chapped at the compliment of having surprised him. 'Yes,' said Boggs, 'that's what I like to see, the office seeking the man; you know, a fellow ought to wait and go about his business until people recognize him. I don't like to see a man going around with his hand out, raking the Freshmen in.' Then he looks around for applause and slopes out, smoking the last of Lyman's Durham."

"He rake in the Freshmen! It would cost too much! Boggs wants the office to seek him, so as to save expense. When he was small I think he must have been the sort of kid that won't play his marbles for fear that he'll wear them out. He'd do anything mean to get office, but he won't spend money for it; he has enough, too; he doesn't have to pinch as he does, but he hates to spend a nickel when he can worm it out of other people. I'd love to get a feed out of him in some way; oh, it would taste good!"

Pellams' ruddy face glowed fire-red with the dawn of an idea. His inspiration had come.

"James Russell Lowell Mason, I'll bet you the price of—anything you name—that I can get a feed, a genuine, Mayfield-with-all-accompaniments, a Mayfield beer-beefsteak-Swiss-cheese-wine-and-song feed out of Boggsie!"

The aroma of the coffee filled the room. Jimmy polished his stein and a tumbler and poured for the two of them.

"But for my principle never to bet on a sure thing, I'd take you," he answered calmly. "You exclusive frat-men over on the Row" (Pellams was always loafing around the Hall) "haven't lived long enough with Boggsie to know him. He's a lobster, Pellams."

But the fat Junior sat there with mirth shining from every line of his face, and drank his coffee; then he rolled on the floor in joyous delirium and beat Jimmy's rugs with an Indian club until the man overhead jumped out of bed and shouted uncultured things down the elevator.

"Jimmy, darling!" cried he, waving a leg in the air for pure rapture, "Boggsie will treat, sure. We'll get him on his one big weakness; we'll play politics against pinching; you watch the office seek the man."

"I don't—"

"I do. Look here; to-morrow we nominate him. You have a mob on the back seats applauding like fiends, and I'll be the power behind the throne to such a campaign of blood, beer and boodle as you never saw, old Laundry-bags. We'll make Boggsie think he's ahead all the time; we can get him some votes, you know; and then he's to go away election day for the sake of the proprieties. I telegraph to him, 'Elected by one vote. Feed!' We have the feed business all properly worked up by that time, of course; just sizzling in his brain, and when he gets off the train we'll meet him with a mob and a brass band, run him to Mayfield or Menlo, and there'll be a sound of revelry by night at his expense."

The ruin of this particular cramming seminary was accomplished. The "coffee hours" were spent in a conference broken by smothered laughter, and by "Nosey" Marion's sleepy protests from behind the curtains.

Next day, after Higgins and Castleton had been duly placed in nomination, Pellams rose from his seat in Chapel and nominated "Lorenzo Boggs, gentleman and student; a man who has let college politics alone, never having sought office from his fellow-students until now, when the office seeks him—Lorenzo Boggs for Student-Body president," amidst a storm of applause half ironical, half worked up by Jimmy Mason.

Pellams flunked in the examination; his co-conspirator passed meagerly; but Pellams' heart lost little of its wonted buoyancy. This was about the last class of any kind he attended in the week between nomination and election. From the Row to the Hall and from the Hall to Palo Alto he moved with an energy rare to his rotund body. It was a new sensation, politics with a josh behind. He revelled in it.

"We have to put up some show of constituents, you know," he said to Mason; "and, as Higgins and Castleton have no strings on me, I might as well help Boggsie out. Too bad my personal magnetism isn't being diffused for a more likely candidate."

"Looks curious," said Jimmy, "the fight Boggs is putting up. Yesterday I struck the Women's Debating League; they won't vote for Higgins because they have been credibly informed—by the Castleton people, of course—that he's bad, and—"

"You and I should have been nominated, St. James," interrupted Pellams, crossing his hands on his breast and looking at the gas fixture.

"And they won't vote for Castleton because they have found out that when he fixed up the open meeting between his society and theirs he was only playing for votes."

"Do you know that Boggs has a girl cousin in Palo Alto? He has worked her to whoop it up for him down there."

"His literary society will go for him all right. They are tired of the way Castleton and Higgins have been waiting for the job to drop down like a ripe plum. Those two marks have worked the thing too long."

"Jimmy, you don't mean that Boggs has any chance?"

"Not a ghost. But we don't have to work up the whole thing; there'll be enough to make a decent showing and lend an air of truth to that telegram of ours. What have you done?"

"Got the Rhos, anyway. We won't vote for anyone as a frat; the fellows hate Castleton on account of that Annual-board election last Christmas, and Higgins has thrown mud at us that we know of. I've about signed them all, except Duncan. Bob knew Higgins' wife's cousin in some dark corner of the country. Say, it's funny how tired people in general are getting of Higgins and Castleton and their gang politics. At Palo Alto yesterday I heard a crowd talking about it. 'Down with organized politics,' they said, and one of them who works in the laboratory with Boggsie said he was going to vote for modest merit."

"Keep it going, Pellams, it won't hurt. Soothe his feelings beautifully after the banquet. I have it all fixed up to get him off the campus."

Higgins' stock went down wonderfully in the next few days. Higgins, said the Castleton men, had pulled wires and worked combinations ever since he had been in the University. It hurts a College politician to have it known that he has been in politics. They pointed to his rather doubtful record as a member of the Daily Palo Alto board. The sins of his Freshman days rose up against him when they touched on the fact that he had been elected class-president on a barb ticket, and had immediately gone over to the enemy in a fraternity house. Finally, to fill his cup, a Freshman, who had withstood fraternity blandishments for a year, glided through the hands of the Gamma Chi Taus, who fully believed they had him, and appeared on the very Sunday preceding election in all the glory of Higgins' frat pin. It was a bad slip; right there it cost fifteen Gamma Chi votes with a large girl following.

"It isn't the swell girls that count for numbers, anyway," reflected the Higgins' supporters, wisely, and they turned to the cultivation of the dig girl who trails up the cinder paths mornings at eight, and who lives in the library during football practice. But the girl cousin of Boggs had been there to good purpose when they turned in that direction, and Roble only showed Castleton still ahead. Then a not over-scrupulous Junior in Higgins' trail started a story on Castleton, a tale calculated to put him in the same category, so far as being "bad" was concerned. Wednesday evening the anecdote reached Roble; a girl who had a brother heard it spreading at dinner, and by noon next day half the girls in Roble had their opinion of a crowd that would start such a malicious libel on Mr. Castleton "just to get votes." The Encina politicians did not know Roble girls for nothing.

So it happened on Thursday that Pellams clumped breathlessly into Jimmy's room with a still wet copy of the _Daily_ and tragically pointed to the notice: "_WithdrawalI: I hereby withdraw from my candidacy for Student-Body presidency in favor of Lorenzo Boggs. Andrew Higgins."

"Ye gods," gasped the Sophomore, "he can't win, Pellams, he can't! Castleton gets it sure. For heaven's sake, don't put the gang on to this until after to-morrow, though. I wouldn't have the double-cross worked on us for a cool ten credits."

Fair dawned the day that was to float or to wreck so many little hopes. There are two periods of the year when the professor who has been young forgets the roll-call, and the one who never has been, remembers it. The first period comes in late November; the other is the morning of the Student-Body election.

With consummate tact, Jimmy had come to an understanding with Boggs as to the propriety of his leaving the campus during the election.

"You see, you stand a splendid show of getting it," he explained, "and the appropriate thing for you is to keep out of sight. When Pellams nominated you he made a point out of the fact that the office was seeking you; that has been a leading feature of the campaign, and it has won you lots of votes. You must not spoil the impression you have made for yourself and which we have emphasized all along. See?"

Boggs saw, or thought he did, and went to town, ostensibly to carry out a commission for Pellams, but not before he had rallied some of his constituents and given them final instructions. It was wonderful to see what a variety of tastes and interests were represented. An older politician would have scented danger from the fact that so many of them had never come out into the arena before; but Jimmy only looked with smiling curiosity on the Ethics major or the Education "shark," dug up somewhere from their abstruse speculations.

It was on their way to the station that Jimmy touched on the remaining issue of the campaign which he was managing.

"You remember my speaking about a feed the other day? I ought to have spoken more fully, but I've been busy with other details."

"Oh,"—began Boggs.

"You know the custom," cut in the conspirator; "it will be expected of you if you get the office; it ought to come off to-night to be done properly."

"That will all be attended to," said Boggs calmly.

"You've seen about it?"

"It's all fixed."

"There'll be a lot of them; they will meet you at the train and you'll have to do it in shape. I can lend you a little."

"Thanks, old man," said the victim, squeezing Mason's arm, "but just you leave that to me. It's all arranged to do the square thing by the people who have stood in with me. So long. Look out for me, won't you? I'll be down on the Flyer."

When Jimmy got back to the Quadrangle there was a shifting mass about the polls. Encina politicians were there, Palo Alto politicians, serious-looking fellows from the Camp, and spruce ones from the Row. Castleton's followers stood in groups, looking smug and confident, while sour-faced Higgins people were revengefully putting in all their work for Boggs.

Every election has its Mark Hanna; this time it was Jennie Brown, whom Pellams knew as "Boggsie's dig girl cousin." She was the silent spirit of the whole Boggs campaign. Mason, in telling the story of it afterward, said:

"Pellams and I were there when the polls opened. That girl was on hand, too, with a gang of Palo Alto girls all ready to start things for Boggsie. Well, you ought to have seen her. Heaven help us and our masculine schemes if they get women suffrage and the Brown lives. At ten-thirty in the first rush she steered a whole Education class, worked them beautifully past Castleton's hungry heelers, right up to the ballot-box. She wasn't working combinations; it cut no ice with her how they voted for managers, and treasurers and editors, so long as they were solid for Lorenzo Boggs.



"I numbered them off as they voted, and I could see that things were going darkly and suspiciously for our friend the Lobster. 'What do you think of it?' says Pellams. He was getting excited. 'We didn't know our power, did we? Look at the votes he's rolling up. Say, we're corkers and never knew it!' A few classes from the respectable part of the Quad, where they do Political Science, came drifting along then with votes for Castleton, and it went Castleton for awhile; then a lull during class, followed by a scattering vote for Boggs. It was about an even thing during eleven-thirty break, with Castleton still ahead. The frat votes fell in bunches in the biggest rush at noon; I could catch old Boggsie's name marked on most of them, but Castleton was full fifty to the good then. I bolted lunch with Pellams at his house and came back to the Quad. Things were beginning to happen. People I never heard of, the kind of bird that floats in and out on the train and probably doesn't know there is a Student-Body with troubles of its own; digs, crawling out into the light, blinking away at the line; Laboratory fiends in squads, actually losing twenty minutes of precious credit,—the darndest crowd of resurrected stiffs the Quad ever saw, strung out from the registrar's office to the polls, every last one of them squeezing a ballot properly marked ahead, all looking as if it were a conferring of degrees, serious as hell, you know, and the eye of the Brown girl or of one of her crowd fastened on each of them. Poor Castleton, he was a goner! His heelers got up against this line of sphinxes and fell back, done up. It was two o'clock and after; still the vote rolled up. At two-thirty they closed shop, and Pellams and I fell on each other's chests behind a pillar, and busted at the josh on ourselves.

"Then we went over to get the figures of our triumph. 'Boggs, 402; Castleton, 375,' and the biggest vote in the history of the office. Well, you bet we went down to the train! Couldn't freeze us out! We were going to pry open the Lobster's claws and use them for a corkscrew. So we piled into a 'bus. But, honest, we were paralyzed.

"Down at the station was the conquering Brown with her people, all watching for the train. Say, when Boggsie saw the whole gang of us, he was a balloon. He got up on a truck and made us a speech of thanks. Pellams and I yelled 'Hear, Hear,' right along. Oh, it was awful! He gave us the whole history of the Student-Body from the days of 'Ninety-one up. Finally Pellams couldn't stand it any longer and called out, 'Good boy, Boggsie. How about that feed?' and Boggsie waved his hand like a Tuesday evening spieler and said, 'I have provided for that, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Brown, my cousin, invites you all down to her home in Palo Alto for a little refreshment. Everyone is welcome.'

"I had to pick my fat friend up. Boggsie's getting out of the whole thing without spending a bean knocked him cold. But he got his wind later. You ought to have heard his speech down there at the house, with a plate of melted strawberry muck in one hand and a glass of sour in the other, replying to Boggsie's vote of thanks to us two, and skinning his face at the Brown girl. Oh, it was a peach!"



IN THE DARK DAYS.



In the Dark Days.

"Mrs. Leland Stanford has decided to sell her jewels to keep open the doors of the University."

ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTS, 1896.

Bonita, mother of racers, stood just beyond the shadow of an oak tree, leisurely cropping the new pasture grass. Occasionally, she lifted her head toward the red roofs of the University buildings as though she expected somebody. The chimney sent up a stripe of black against patches of cloud and sky, and the even hum of the shops came across the pasture with a distinctness born of the motionless Spring air. Bonita, putting her pointed ears forward, could catch the upper notes of the chorus, rehearsing in the Chapel.

Such a day as this should bring Craig into the pastures. He could lean on the fence and pull at his pipe to his heart's content. The brood-mare did not fancy the smoke, but she liked to have him talk to her. There were a number of interests they had in common; the smell of the new grass, the tempting silver-green of willows budding along the lake beyond the fence, delighted him, too, while Bonita herself was deeply interested in his University.

She could remember perfectly the days when the ranch spread undisturbed from her paddock in the stockfarm yard to the deep shadows of the Arboretum. Then she was only a colt, to be sure; but the world beyond the paddock fence interested her. The grooms in the yard were not more sorry than she herself that the last colt from a famous sire should be a filly with an imperfect ankle-joint. When they took the other colts out of the paddock to put them through their morning lessons around the little ring in the kindergarten, she wished mightily to follow. She turned about the corral at a good speed to show them that she had the proper spirit of her blood, but they always shut the red gate too soon and the others went on up the road impudently flicking their fuzzy tails at her.

A gray-bearded man with kindly eyes, whom they called the "Governor," used to drive up under the blossoming eucalyptus trees every now and then; he stopped one day by her paddock and came to look at her. Bonita liked him at once, and she paid him the most delicate attention she knew by trying to eat his clothes. The Governor laughed as he put her off, and said that it was too bad about her ankle. Then he drove over to watch the kindergarten learn the alphabet of race-winning.

Later, she watched her fellows go lightly down the road to the stock car and rumble away over the track to the main line and on to the great world where men put trust in them and sent them back to the Farm with newspaper clippings and horseshoe wreaths made of immortelles with the figure 2-and-a-fraction in the middle.

When she was grown and they had put her out in a side pasture, there were some new stables there, with a lot of men thronging round them who did not look like grooms. The knowledge that something of importance to the world was about to happen the other side of the fence made her feel more contented. If she could not travel in a box car to see such things, it was good to have some of the excitement of it brought in to the ranch.

At first she did not notice much, being deeply interested just then in the early education of Fenelon, 2.10-1/4, who was a fretful infant and took up most of her time. When he had passed out of her immediate care and was cropping sweet alfalfa with the rest, she watched curiously the foundations sinking into the grass, the crowd of people who came one May morning to hear things said round a block of yellow sandstone, the fitting of the red tiling above the stone walls. By this time she knew the reason of it all; the dead heir, the monument, the boys and girls who were coming to be taught in this great kindergarten. Finally, when these had poured into the place, some of them straggled out into the pasture and made friends with her. From them she learned more definitely the great things that had been done and were about to happen; they told her of the wonderful endowment, of the strangers from corners of the world never reached even by the lucky horses who had rolled away in the box cars, of the numberless buildings that were to surround and dwarf the structures she had seen grow up in the sun.

"The Governor" had driven less often through the yard since the yellow buildings were up, and the boys and girls playing among them. After awhile he ceased to come altogether. Then Bonita, the brood-mare, understood that something had happened. It was more quiet everywhere after this. Most of the horses and mares, her colts among them, went off in the cars, not to come back, they told her. She stood under the dark oaks for hours at a time, fearing lest they would send her, too. Her longing for the world was past now; she wished to be left in the quiet pastures with the students to talk to.

It was during these days that Craig, who taught something to the younger people, used to lean on the fence and smoke during the afternoons. He was not much older than many of the students she knew, and she liked him particularly. He had lumps of something white and sweet, and he rubbed her head in exactly the right spot. When she had won his confidence, he told her many things about himself and the College. Once he had been at another place, a college older than this by a long time but not so famous. The Overseer of this one had written him to come and teach there, at a better salary. He explained to her what this meant—money for the support of his mother, and in a few years the study in Europe of which he dreamed, and for which he worked and saved, and beside this the growing up with a new university, from an instructorship in the present to a full professorship in the wonderful future. He told her what was promised him, and showed her a picture once of the plan of the completed university, with its arch and chapel tower and the great mechanical shops spreading back across her shady pasture to the borders of the lake.

Then she learned what the death of "the Governor" had brought upon them; why the horses had been sold and why there were no more hammers nor chisels ringing against the stone. The farm was losing a thousand dollars a day, and the Government had seized upon the money they were building the monument with and was trying to wrest it entirely from the woman who had stopped once to pet the brood-mare when "the Governor" was driving in the yard. These things were hard to understand. There had never been any question of money here that Bonita could remember.

One day she had nosed vainly for the sugar he used to bring; Craig told her that for two months he had had no money to give his mother; that if it wasn't for a grocer in Mayfield who was kind to people in trouble, they would have had nothing to eat. Bonita, remembering the students she had seen gathering mushrooms, suggested grass; but he told her, laughing, that only one man to his knowledge had ever lived that way and he was a king, long ago, in the holy times. He, Craig, would have to have money. In an old vest he had worn in the East, his mother found a few pennies and had walked to Palo Alto and spent them for stamps for the sake of paying for something. After this explanation, Bonita did not hunt for sugar.

Although things grew easier after a time, Craig was gloomy enough during the afternoons when they talked across the fence. Once "the Governor's Wife" had been given five hundred dollars to pay her servants, and she had given it to the Overseer for his teachers. But the Overseer had begun at the houses where there were the most children, and he had not got around to Craig, who had only a mother. When temptation came to him, he told Bonita about it and asked her advice. A letter had come to him with an offer from his old college; it meant a full salary and the hope of Europe. It was everything to him, he said, but he couldn't bear to go away. The brood-mare had put her nose affectionately against his arm. She understood little about the salary, but she knew how dreadful it would be to leave the pasture. The man must have understood, for after being quiet a long time and smoking harder than ever, he said that he was going to stay. But many times after that, when other offers came, he told her how hard it was to decide and how black everything looked for the University. The Government was pulling at the fund, and the lady who was building the monument was going to sell her precious things to get money.

The last time Craig leaned on the fence and whistled to her, he had been very unhappy. Since then Bonita had not seen him. She was afraid that he, too, had gone, after all, as the horses and grooms had gone, without even a good-bye. She felt that if he had finally decided to give it up, the smoke must fade away above the top of the chimney and the voices cease altogether.

But to-day, when the clouds were breaking and the clear blue of summer-time looked down between them, the chimney-smoke was blacker than ever and across by the lake fence some young people were pulling mushrooms and laughing. Bonita looked over toward the buildings. Then she cropped grass again, for only a gurgling meadow-lark broke the line of the fence-rail.

Suddenly she heard Craig's low whistle. He had come out from the Wood-shop and put his elbows on the fence, his pipe sending up clear, white smoke. Stopping now and then for a blade of grass, to show that she was not too eager, the brood-mare walked slowly up to him. He was not happy, as she had expected to find him. His brow was puckered and his lips shut tightly on the stem of his pipe. Bonita put her nose over the fence. The instructor took his pipe from his mouth and rubbed her cheek slowly with the back of his knuckles.

"Well, old girl," he said, "I'm afraid you and I won't have many more talks over this fence."

The brood-mare looked at him with questioning eyes.

"I plead guilty," he went on, "I oughtn't to have kept the secret from you, I know. The minute I got the letter I should have come out to tell you about it, but it was raining; honestly, it was."

He gave her a lump of sugar by way of conciliation.

"You see, I couldn't resist this one," he continued, while the sugar crunched under her teeth; "it's a big honor and three thousand a year, and I've got to do something; now, haven't I?"

His tone was doubtful, as though he were hardly sure of her opinion. The meadow-lark which he had disturbed was releasing the joy of its full throat under a shaft of sunlight further down the fence. The air hung over them, sweet with the fragrance of the freshened pasture, charged with the mysterious power of a Santa Clara Spring. No man, or horse, who has caught that smell, ever forgets the valley of the Saint. Bonita was looking across the green to the mushroom gatherers.

Craig spoke, a little petulantly.

"You never agree with me about my going, anyway. You seem to think that the beauty of this campus and the freedom of everything here is argument enough. But it's all too uncertain. I've told you that my salary is cut away down and I'm not any too sure of ever having it made up to me; as it is, we assistants are here only because the heads decided to cut their own pay and keep us for the sake of the departments. If the suit is lost, it's good-bye, anyway. I can't believe you have much idea that we're going to win it to-morrow. It went for us in the lower courts, here in California, but do you think that the Supreme Court of these selfish and United States is going to decide for us just because they were gallant enough to Mrs. Stanford to hurry the case up in the calendar and cut short her suspense? You don't understand things, if you think so. Out here where you live, the rains may be late and the grass seem never coming, but you know it'll rain sooner or later, and you're getting hay right along and it doesn't take much water to bring up what you want. But with me it's different. We're going to get a weather prediction from Washington to-morrow that'll tell us definitely whether it's to be winter for keeps around here or summer and a good crop."

The instructor leaned on the fence and puffed on at his pipe. Bonita endured the smoke that clung around them in the still air, for she felt that they were at a crisis. She drew up closer to the rails and put her head against the instructor's shoulder. Suddenly, the man let his pipe fall into the grass and he laid his face against her soft, gray nose.

"You're a good old girl," he said, "and you know more about it than anyone. But you haven't any money question to worry you. You don't love the place a bit more than I do; you don't love it as much, because you only know the nature side of it, and I know the bigness of the rest of it, too. But the hope's almost dead, old lady; I can't tie my ambitions to a corpse, you wouldn't ask me to, and you know I'm not the only one to be looked after. But, oh, it'll be hard to go, won't it! There's something that grips you where you live—you understand it."

The brood-mare did not pull away, although he was holding her head tightly in his hot hands.

"If it all goes smash to-morrow and I can ever raise the money, I'm going to send back for you, my beauty. You're getting too old to bring much now, and you'll have to go sure if the Government wins."

Bonita lifted her head suddenly. A drop of cold rain had fallen against her face. The clouds had drawn together sulkily above them. Across the intervening turf hastened the mushroom gatherers, their baskets full of the brown and white trophies. Craig picked up his pipe.

"Good-bye," he said, with a caress. "I'll come over to-morrow and tell you the final news."

Bonita had never shown him how much she really cared, true to her feminine reserve; but to-day, leaning her slender neck far over the fence, she whinnied after him until he stopped at the corner of the Power-house and waved back to her. Then she cropped grass slowly while it began to sprinkle.

Next morning, when the second hour was about half through, a feeling of excitement filled the Quad and penetrated the classrooms. Craig's students were not paying very creditable attention to his lecture. He himself was keeping his mind on the syllabus with considerable difficulty. When someone passed the window and the eyes of the entire class, including even the enthusiastic dig on the front seat, were turned that way, Craig let his own wander and hesitated the least bit in his talk.

All at once, like a thunderclap, a half-dozen voices somewhere in the Quad gave the yell. Craig stopped speaking and looked at the class, who gazed back at him. A man with his back to the windows stood up and looked out. The seats creaked ominously. Then, like grass after a breeze, the whole class rose and craned necks at the window.

The instructor, coming to himself, began feebly:

"If you please—"

Again the yell, not the desperate cry that is wrung out to cheer a losing team, but the voice of victory, of joy and of great relief.

Professor Craig went out of his classroom like a shot, the class after him.

There was a triumphal parade to the station, with flags and the entire population of Roble beating time with dust-pans and brooms, to meet the President who had sent the happy telegram. There were songs and speeches and demonstrations in front of Xasmin House, with fellows hugging each other or swinging round in side-line fashion, girls crying, and the President's parrot incidentally learning the yell. Then, at night, the alumni poured in on the trains from north and south, stirring the tumult anew. Gay lanterns jewelled the porches of the Row, the Gym blazed with light for more speeches and football songs, with no thought of football in the singing of them, and round and round the shadowy Quad, where the yell flashed in electric letters, went a wild carnival procession of men and women, with torches and noise-machines, and Instructor Craig at their head.

The gleam of the unusual lights, the happy shouts, and the clamor of firecrackers, came in mingled confusion across to the dark pasture where Bonita stood by the fence with her head raised and her pointed ears forward. Craig had not come that afternoon to tell her the final truth; but, listening and watching from the shadow, she did not feel that he had gone away.

When she did see him again, he wore a new suit and, what was more important, its pockets bulged with sugar. She was very glad to see him, of course, but her greeting was an indifferent one after all; for she was preoccupied, just then, with the infant needs of Pronto 2:17-3/4, and could not stop to interest herself in the fact that the youngest of the universities had been saved for all time.



CROSSROADS.



Crossroads.

"Oh see ye not yon narrow road So thick beset wi' thorns and briers? That is the Path of Righteousness, Though after it but few inquires.

"And see ye not yon braid, braid road, That lies across the lily leven? That is the Path of Wickedness, Though some call that the road to Heaven."

THOMAS THE RHYMER.

I.

The regular after-dinner crowd was smoking in Frank Lyman's Encina boudoir, lolling over his sofa, their feet on his table, their legs tangled on his iron bedstead. The steam heat was coming "Clank! clank!" into the radiators, for it was a cold, clear evening in the time between rains. Outside the fog was thick upon the hills, sending gray ghost-fingers over toward the valley. You could lean from the window and smell its clean moisture, mingling with the scent of young plants in the fresh-turned earth. Frank himself sat close to the window and looked out toward the gymnasium, because he had discovered a new amusement. There was a section of the board walk between Encina and the gym which was flooded just to its top by a pool from the late rain, so that if you stepped heavily thereon the plank gave a bit and dropped you into the water. The diversion consisted in betting with "Pegasus" Langdon on the style of crossing adopted by chance wayfarers. The stakes were five cents a corner. Frank backed the class who took the thing at one bound; "Peg" laid his coin on those who went over on their tiptoes, trying not to spring the plank into the water. For every one who did neither, but walked around the puddle, five cents a corner went into the tobacco fund. It was just as good as matching nickels and involved less exertion.

There is a theory in the Hall that you can tell a man's habits by the rooms he occupies there. The nearer he gets to the corner fronting on the baseball field, the more sociable is his nature. Those who hold the rooms at that corner or on the second or third floors, so as to be in easy hail of anyone coming in at the back entrance, are Public Characters. Their apartments are reception rooms in very truth. It has never been explained why Encina does not sag at that end, like an excursion steamer on the side toward a boat race. If, on the other hand, you believe you have a Mission, or if you are a Dig, rooming in the Hall because it is convenient to the Quad, then you dwell in "Faculty Row," away off to the east, where the early sun pulls you out in time to put the finishing touches to your Latin, and where there is no trafficking to and from the Quad to disturb your evening study.

It was said that Frank Lyman was the only man at the Quadrangle end of the Hall who ever made much pretense of studying. By the same token the keepers of the college tradition alleged that he alone of all the gang stood high in the opinion of the Faculty. It was a way he had. He stood well with everybody.

If they had taken the trouble to investigate, those who wondered at his ability both to loaf much and to study much, at his scholarship dwelling alongside of his popularity, they might have found that he kept the two things in harmony by a marvelous system. The gang dwelt in his room, made it their hang-out, but only just so long; when the hour arrived for Lyman's study-time, they vanished away mysteriously, took the hint conveyed in some fashion, no one ever knew how, and were gone.

To the under-classmen, Lyman was an object of healthy awe. Older than the average senior, he had been already in the larger world. His opinion of things had especial value even in his Junior year. After the football season, when he had been acknowledged the keenest manager the college had ever found, the under-classmen had a blind faith in his infallibility. The older students relied on him in much the same way, though there were some who said that self lay at the bottom of Lyman's system of morals, that the watchword of his philosophy was "Does it pay?" These men were sentimentalists who had ideals. Langdon, the Sequoia editor, would have told you that he thought more of Lyman than of any two men in the class; it is a question, though, whether he would have recommended Lyman's advice in everything. Frank was a good man to keep a Freshman's money for him, to listen to his class-room troubles or to stand between the luckless youngster and Faculty wrath; but when it was a case into which something deeper entered, perhaps the Senior's worldly philosophy was not of the best sort. This was the idea of dreamers like "Pegasus" Langdon, who said things about "sentiment" and to whom Freshmen seldom came for advice. But Lyman continued to hold his after-dinner receptions, and his admirers piled themselves comfortably on his bed and believed in him implicitly.

The psychological moment came for the regular withdrawal. Frank opened his windows with care, donned the old bath-robe which was his armor for the battle intellectual, put on his eye-shade over his straight brown hair, and opened his Pollock. At this hint the others slipped out; only Jimmie Mason lingered, his gaze on the shadowy hills with their faint fringe of dark green, the dregs of his pipe purring in the stillness. Lyman's room-mate was somewhere queening. Lyman himself, pretending to study, looked up from time to time, waiting for the Sophomore to unbosom himself. Frank knew the symptoms.

"Well, Jimmie?" he said at length—one couldn't study with that going on and Frank had his stint to finish.

"It's about my father."

"Drinking again?"

Jimmie only nodded. The smoke went out in his pipe; he knocked the ashes from it and put it away mechanically in the common pipe-rack over the radiator.

"Tell me about it." Frank had closed his book, and was leaning back in his tilted chair, his feet braced in the shelf beneath, his hands clasped over his knees.

"Not much to tell, I guess, no more than you know already. I got a letter from the old lady."

"Your grandmother, eh?"

"Yes. She says something must be done. 'In low saloons,' she says, and I've been sizing it up—and Frank, don't you think I ought to go home?"

A silence again, with Lyman's alarm clock ticking placidly on the table between them.

It had come, the moment to bring the boy around; Frank had waited for it in the weeks since he had known the story. In this silence he mapped out his argument, as he would have prepared a brief.

"How much has your father ever helped you, Jimmie?"

"Not much. We've always been poor, you know."

"Because he drank?"

"Yes, he never could keep a job but so long."

"Not even when you were small?"

"I wasn't with him then. When my mother got—when she left him, she took me with her. Then she died, and I was with my grandmother awhile, then I lived with him until I came here."

"Are you very fond of him?"

"No, Frank, I'm not; not a bit. He never did anything for my mother or for me, to make me."

"I don't see why you lived with him then."

"He'd behave himself better. I had a sort of influence over him. He was afraid of me, or ashamed, or something, and I stuck to him to keep him straight. But, oh! I hated it, and when he got going all right, I cut loose and came here."

"What sort is the old lady? W. C. T. U. and all that kind of thing, I suppose?"

"Something on that order."

The Oracle leaned forward until his chest came almost between his bent knees, as was his wont when he clinched his arguments.

"I suppose you've never figured it out that people of her way of thinking would call what little drinking you do at Mayfield 'drinking in low saloons?'"

By his silence Jimmie admitted that there was something in the position. Frank followed up his lead.

"So it may be nothing very bad after all. But let's suppose it is; suppose he has slid back into the worst of his old ways, is it going to pay to go on and break things all up for yourself, for the purpose of trying to bolster him up? It seems to me you would let your enthusiasm get away with your common sense. But it's your business, Jimmie. Only the thing that gets me is the blooming uselessness of it all. What can you do?"

"I can work."

"You could do that before you came here. You see, it was all right before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. You can't cure that thing in a month, nor a year, nor two years. If he is drinking, regular and hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't you?"

"Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things.

"It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I don't understand."

"He is my father," said the Sophomore. This reason had seemed ample, when he was thinking it over alone; it did not sound so convincing now.

"And suppose he is, do you have to pay for that? No, Jimmie, that's a fine sentimental view of it that won't help either of you. Let him wait. You have the right to do it. He can wait two years, till you've had your chance. If it has been going on all this time, two years won't be long, and then when you're through and ready to do something, there'll be sense in it; there isn't now.—"

Just then Freshman Halleck, who had a genius for poking in where he was not wanted, knocked and entered with Encina abruptness, for Frank had not locked the door. He made his stay so long that Lyman, with his thoughts on his unfinished work, said:

"Well, good-night, you fellows," as a gentle hint, and Jimmie withdrew.

The fog had not yet come into the valley when the Sophomore opened the window, down in his own room; it was reaching out, still driven before a lazy wind. Indistinctly the singing of the Glee Club, rolling home from practice in the Quad, came through the damp twilight. Jimmie had been with them on the Christmas trip, tasting a social life he had known nothing of till then. Now they were going to run him for leader next year. He sat on his window ledge listening. The side of the Hall stretched away from him, four tiers of light where the fellows were at work or were bumming away the week-night. Through the opened windows came the low tone of many conversations, stirred now and then by a "rough-house" note. A coyote barked somewhere among the hills, a reminder of the nearness of our higher life to the life universal. Jimmie took a long, deep breath of the moist air, as though he would draw it all, all unto himself. This was his life, he had made it for himself, and he loved it, he loved it! He had no part any longer with what had come before it. All these were in shadow, the people and things of his bitter childhood. The fellows up there in the lighted rooms had homes somewhere; there was a feed-box being opened even then, perhaps, at some study table; they were thinking of vacation, most of them, and of other places. But this was home to Mason, this wide, soft campus, with the sandstone arching over it and bounded by shaggy hills, the only place he could call his own. Most of the laughing people who lived here with him were in a dream from which some Commencement Day would wake them. To Mason it was reality. Yes, Frank Lyman was right. Jimmie was glad he had asked him. The idea of going away had been a thoughtless impulse, an immature judgment. He would stay—for the two years.

He took off his coat and opened a book under the lamp; but a face came and settled between him and the page, a bloated face with irresolute lips that would not move from the black and white before him, but flickered there and mocked him, until finally he closed the book, and, without looking out again on the campus, turned into bed.

II.

It was a quiet night outside. The last spring rain was over; the dry, deadening California summer had begun its advance on the land. Already, the green of the hills had faded into a lighter hue, a forerunner of a yellow June and a brown July. The campus was astir with the movement of a Friday night. Shadowy figures, in couples, came and passed down the fairy-land vistas of the Quadrangle; the 'busses deposited the elite of Palo Alto at the door of the Alpha Nus who had said that they would be at home; noises of all kinds, from not unmusical singing to plainly unmusical whoops, exhaled from every pore of the Hall. The piano on the lobby was groaning out a waltz from its few attuned keys and the little space between the big rug and the rail overlooking the dining-room was packed with forms in various conditions of negligee, dancing earnestly and painfully.

Only one room, and that generally the center of disturbance, "sported the oak." Jimmie Mason sat in the knockery, with a book cocked up in front of him, and made a pretense of studying, but his thoughts wandered. Finally he threw his work aside altogether, and looked at the little patches of starlight visible between the branches of the tree outside. It was so plain, the thing he ought to do, in justice to himself, that he had thought the dream of the other thing a fancy that had passed and had been put away with the notions of his prep-days. And yet he had found no peace in his new decision. His plans for next year, his work in class, his new success with certain ventures which after two years of the hardest, closest pinching, had put within his reach the means to gratify a few little whims, to indulge in a few things his poverty had hitherto forbidden him—a few common things the men around him enjoyed, and the lack of which he had ever concealed even from himself—all these were made footless by the ache in the bottom of his soul. And, as he sat and pondered on it, a hard, dull resentment which he had hitherto kept down by sheer will power rose above his other thoughts and claimed admission as a reality. His father had no right to do this thing to him. He was an old man; his chance was past, given up for a few barrels, more or less, of distilled spirits. It was for this that the something inside was asking him to forfeit the chance he had made for himself. The University was his home. His father had done nothing toward this. The laundry agency had provided a living, and the broad democracy of the college had done the rest for him. He was one of the "prominent men" now, a somebody, as he had never been and never could be in the travesty of home that had been his father's giving. Upon his life here rested the possibilities of the future toward which he looked dreamingly sometimes when his notes were written up, and the laundry accounts checked. Assuredly, his father had no claim on this; to admit it would be an injustice to himself, to his ambition, and to his work. And yet this face which had come between him and his book the first night the fight had been on must haunt him always in the hour when his tide was turning.

A thump on the window which opened on the front piazza recalled him from his reverie. A dozen feet were shuffling on the stones outside, and a ruddy face glowed over the sash.

"Go away, Pellams. Got to plug," said Jimmie, hastily resuming his book.

"Relate your predicaments to a constable," said Pellams. "There's going to be a Thirsting Bee at the——"

"Can't go. Got to work on my thesis."

"Relate that to your Uncle Adderclaws. Tumble out, now."

Jimmie only shook his head. There was a conference outside in whispers; then the gang withdrew with suspicious alacrity. Two minutes later, the lock grated with the cautious insertion of a key, and the mob rushed in; Jimmie had forgotten the passkey, for whose possession Pellams had held up the Jap.

"Ah, say, get out of here, you fellows. I'm digging."

"I know it. And you're going to stop. Gentlemen adventurers"—here Pellams mounted a chair—"James Mason, our small but thirsty friend, has sourball. Now, I ask you, gentlemen, what is the universal cure for his affliction?"

"Beer!" The unanimity of the response would have done credit to a Roman mob.

"Quite right ye are, my merry retainers. And will ye, in loving kindness to him, apply that remedy?"

"We will! We will!"

"Well said, me liegemen. Jimmie, move along!" and Pellams fell to strolling around the room and criticizing its collection of stolen signs with the air of one who has discharged his business and stands at ease. The rest threw themselves on the man with sourball and were for tearing off his outer garments and forcing on his sweater, but Lyman by some occult means of his own got the boy aside. One never knew how Frank managed the gang; it was always that way; his methods never obtruded themselves, all one saw was results.

"I wouldn't if I were you," said he; "they won't understand it, and it doesn't do you any good—this sort of thing. Better jolly up."

The Sophomore did not speak; he only shook his head.

"I know what you're holding back for," went on the other; "but going down there isn't the same sort of thing; really, it isn't."

Jimmie started a little, inside, as he realized for the first time the base of his aversion to dragging himself out on the trip. He turned, half-mechanically, and began tugging at his collar. That Phantom should never come between him and one single thing he wanted to do. It might embitter it all, but it could never prevent him from the outward act. He threw his tie over a chair and took off his coat with unnecessary emphasis in the movement. Ten minutes later he was treading the primrose path of dalliance with an arm around "Nosey" Marion.

There was a cool breeze off the bay, bringing the scent of salt water along with the odor of spruce-trees. A voice from the upper regions of the Hall called out to the cavalcade, crawling through the half-darkness along the road:

"He-ea, you! Bring some back for me!"

A dozen windows slammed open at that, and twenty throats took up the noise. Pellams was for answering, but Lyman discreetly checked him.

Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his hat to the cool air.

"This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!"

"Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the muse!"

The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased.

"That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield—just to be original."

"And you'll kill the traffic."

"Chain the poet!"

"If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent."

These from half-a-dozen voices at once.

"Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper one for the road to Mayfield—just as you have to have an argumentative one on the road back."

"Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing paragraphs for English Eight."

"It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog he knew.

"How would Jimmie's sore-head do?"

Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! A bas Mason!" And then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air that has split student throats this century long,

"To drive dull care away!"

And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus.

"Gentlemen, remember the motif!" cried Pellams, when they had made their way through the barroom loafers, playing with dingy cards at the dingier tables. The expedition was safely stowed in the back room around the rough table with its carved patch-work of initials, Greek letters, and nicknames, significant or obsolete, according to a man's perspective. Pellams assumed instant control.

"We will now turn our attention to the serious business of the evening. Get your places. Hands on your bottles! Open—corks! And away we go." The party drank in silence.

"Do you begin to improve, James? There is a trace of a smile in the left-hand corner of the patient's mouth. Ruffle up his hair and give him another while we have him going!"

Someone started a song, and they had another drink to punctuate the pause between verses. A ruddier shade was creeping towards the roots of Pellams' hair; Lyman, who smiled but seldom, was grinning across the table at a Sophomore trying to flip cracker crumbs into his mouth.

"This is a tryout," said Pellams. "The first man that balks at his beer will drink raspberry chasers for a month. Hey! look at 'Nosey' Marion trying to shirk!"

Sure enough, Marion, who tried to keep up a reputation for capacity with a naturally slim endowment, was slyly pouring his last potion into an empty beer-case behind him. They fell upon the offender forthwith, whipped him into the ranks again, and resumed their seats, laughing and panting.

"And now that our erring brother is punished and forgiven—that's as good a phrase as I ever saw—punished and forgiven—stick that in the Sequoia, Pegasus"—Pellams rambled on, "we've got to have the motif. I move from the chair that the guest of the evening gives us 'My Old Kentucky Home!' Punish your glass and tune up, Jimmie!"

The cry went on until Jimmie had to respond. He began with the intention of singing it quite carelessly, because there was much in his soul that night that he dared not show before them all; but Jimmie had the gift of song in his heart as in his voice, and he threw himself into the music before the first stanza was half done. Only once before had he sung the song as he did to-night; it was at last Commencement, when he sang it for the Seniors going out on their adventures, and when he was done they had all been still and quiet like men who have seen ghosts—as perhaps they had, that night, the phantoms of men and times haunting certain low, arched buildings they were to see no more.

"Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!"

Jimmie's tender baritone floated up from the table wistfully sweet, and shaken a little with feeling, for the trouble of the week just past was sweeping into it. Lyman, listening, knew of what place the boy was singing, and mentally noted that he had better be thoughtful of the youngster during the rest of the term.

The fellows were quiet for a moment after they had droned out the chorus, each one putting his own meaning into that sweet old song of farewell, and then, to break the charm, a small voice with a Spanish roll in it, piped "Tamales!" at the crack in the door.

"Hey!—Lupe!—make him sing!"

They raided the stock first, and rendered happy with the jingle of silver the quaint little remnant of the race who named their valley for the blessed Santa Clara. Then, when he had counted it and put it safely away with the officious assistance of Pellams Rex, they set him on the table in his blue overalls and over-sized hat and made him sing for them in his pathetic treble, "La Paloma," and for encore, "Two Leetle Girl een Bloo." Pellams removed him after that, claiming that Langdon was about to tell the story of his life, which could not be published in the Sequoia.

Jimmie Mason had sat there all this time, taking it in and drinking with the others, but there was never a cloud on his brain nor a waver in his movements. The rest of them wandered from the motif; each was composing a fugue of his own, according to the mould of his nature. Scraps of their conversation floated in on him between songs—"Got him just below the knees—now!"—"and the difference between me and a tank is in the inferior receptivity—ain't that a peach?—of the receptacle"—"Now, the fallacy of the original proposition, as Herbert Spencer hath it, lies in the expression of the component particulars"—this was Langdon—"that proves that if I had a board Pellams would be summarily chastised"—"Put it down and order up another, here's good drink going stale"—"Whoa, Pegasus, old hoss, that's my tamale you have designs on"—"and cut his name there"—"sing it down! This is to break training for the third time"—"What's the matter with ——ty-eight?"—All this came in on him, as he watched them grow from geniality to hilarity and then on toward enthusiasm. They had forgotten him; only now and then someone shied a cracker at his head and told him to "jolly up."

Another drink, and the patriotic stage was upon them. The King ordered a glass, standing, to the Team, and one with a foot on the table to the Captain, and one with both feet on the table and glasses to the ceiling to the Victory next fall. Someone started the yell; it went round the table. Then they joined in on "Here's to Stanford College," with a verse for every class and its yell at the end, and before they were done there were three howling factions, each trying to cry the others down.

Frank Lyman, he of the steady head, who was quiet or hilarious as he willed, but was never beyond the point where he willed to be, sat watching good-humoredly from his corner, and noted that Jimmie Mason's voice had risen the loudest, and that he, too, had forgotten the motif.

Pellams had wandered into the outer room "to bust the proprietor's blamed old nickel-machine and get even," leaving the disturbance to subside of its own weight. Coming back suddenly to the door, he cried: "Hey, I've got 'em! The raw material and the finished product! Let's have a temperance lecture from Lyman."

It was a queer group at the door. The half-gone Pellams, with his face flushed and his hair dishevelled, in one of his hands little Lupe, hanging to an empty pail and between laughter and tears; the other hand tight on the collar of as dirty, as unkempt, and as drunken an old loafer as ever hung over a Mayfield bar. Pellams swung the ruin in.

"Now, tell us how you got that fine, large tee!" said the tormentor. "Orate to us, General Jackson!"

The old man braced himself, with drunken dignity, against the door.

"You young fellows c'n make fools o' yourselves," he said, "but you can't make fool o' me."

"That's all right, pardner—Nature saved us the trouble in your case," said Pellams, the thoughtless.

The clear head in the room—Lyman's always—took it all in; Frank made a step to come between the Junior and his victim. Then he turned, half-unconsciously, toward Mason. Jimmie was standing with his hands on the table, looking straight before him, and in that look Frank read the certainty that the case was out of his control. For the Face was rising before Jimmie Mason once more; it had twisted itself in with the relaxed, foolish features before him, until he saw his father there, a mock and a shame. It was not his father, of course—he passed his hand before his eyes as though to clear them—but suppose that somewhere else a crowd had his father—and he not there to——

The Angel of Pity, or the Universal Conscience, or whatever it is that you and I have learned from our books and our teachers to put as our symbol of the belief in the higher things, wrote upon his records that night that a prayer had gone up, for the first time, from the dingy back room of the Hotel Mayfield.

Pellams had the old man singing now, in a cracked, maudlin voice, and his keeper was beating time with a billiard cue. Then the amateur conductor had one of his inspirations.

"Hey, a trio! The event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson, Senor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the platform, Senor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in a corner. Then he gestured wildly toward the door.

"Hey, Jimmie, come back here," he called; "don't let him out, boys!"

Jimmie had reached the door when Lyman caught his sleeve.

"Where are you going?"

"Home."

"You mean the Hall?"

Jimmie pulled free of the Senior's hand.

"No!" he said. "Home."



A SONG CYCLE AND A PUNCTURE.



A Song Cycle and a Puncture.

"And I learned about women from 'er!"

KIPLING.

Six Madonnas, from their places on the Chapel walls, gazed at the spectacle of a student with long hair and energetic manner drilling a chorus of young men and women from behind the preacher's desk. There was no visible sign of agitation on the part of the six Madonnas, though an operatic rehearsal in Chapel might be considered reason enough. To be sure, one of them, with her feet upon a crescent moon, kept her eyes fixed religiously on the ceiling, but this had become a habit. The Madonnas were not surprised.

The early years of the University, when there was no assembly hall and the temporary chapel was used for everything that did not demand the superior accommodations of the men's gymnasium, had prepared them for anything. They had looked calmly down upon student farces and Wednesday evening prayer meetings, professional impersonations and baccalaureate sermons. Once, there had been a German farce under the protection of the Germanic Language department, by a company from town, a boisterous play with a gigantic comedienne in a short skirt. Beside this performance, Lillian Arnold's singing a love duet with Jack Smith was nothing very shocking.

Connor, the man who was getting up the opera for the benefit of the Junior Annual, waved his baton gracefully and looked pleased. The rehearsal had gone well that afternoon, and now Cap Smith was singing with creditable expression the love song in the last act. The experience of Connor told him that this song would make even the bleachers at the back of the gymnasium keep a respectful silence, which was saying a good deal. Smith had a very pretty tenor, redeeming its lack of volume by a sympathetic quality that was decidedly pleasant. In a song like this, his voice came out well. There was a high note at the end to be taken pianissimo with something else that signified "as though you meant it." Smith could make it sound so, at any rate. One girl at the back of the chorus always said, "Ah," under her breath when the song was ended at rehearsal.

Lillian Arnold, who played opposite Smith in the opera, did not conceal from herself the pleasure she took in the part. Long before rehearsals began, she had spent her smiles upon Connor with a view to that very role. Miss Arnold was a young person who knew the things she wanted; one of them was Smith. 'Varsity end, champion pole-vaulter, Glee Club tenor and Sophomore president, which means principally leading the cotillion, he was well worth a girl's trouble. There was the more glory in the winning of this capital prize because he was not very enthusiastic about Roble. There was somebody up in town who took a great deal of his blue fraternity-paper. Lillian Arnold knew about the girl in town, so she accepted gracefully what the gods gave and was outwardly content.

The gift of the gods was Ted Perkins, whose vest was decorated like Cap's and who had no entanglements. When the approach of the Sophomore cotillion set Roble agog with a pleasant but hardly strong-minded excitement, he "asked her." Peace of mind comes naturally after such an invitation is given and accepted; on rare occasions this does not last.

The first thing that occurred to ruffle Miss Arnold's complacency was a chance remark dropped one noon by Perkins as they were strolling home obliquely from the Quad.

"Cap isn't going to lead with Miss Martin, after all," said he.

"Indeed!" exclaimed Lillian. For some remote feminine reason the announcement was interesting.

"Her family has gone South suddenly, a death or something. Cap is all broken up about it. He was going to show her off in style that night."

"I wonder whom he will ask, now," she said, as though it didn't matter the least bit in the world.

Down somewhere in a girl's heart lies the gambler's instinct. Lillian would have thrown away then and there the certainty of Ned Perkins' timely invitation for the torturing suspense, the alluring chance, that attended the Sophomore president's second choice. Perkins, in his simple masculine dullness, never guessed this.

"I don't believe he knows yet; he wouldn't tell over at the house if he did. Another plum for unengaged Roble."

Perkins would have been less at ease over the condition of engaged Roble could he have looked into the little east music-room where Lillian played accompaniments, and Cap Smith, leaning over a wicker chair, went through the music of his part. These cozy rehearsals in the quiet afternoons had resulted in Smith's asking himself, during a cut home through the Quad, why he had never noticed Lillian Arnold in particular. Connor, the director, had a keener eye, evidently. She was pretty, dashing and real good fun. Perkins was entitled to respect for his selection. Lillian was "all right;" this is a masculine term which may mean anything from mild approval to the rapture of "just one girl." The mild interpretation, of course, is to be put upon Smith's use of the term, even after he had been to Roble two evenings. Their talk was about the opera, nothing further, and when he had taken his high note with just the proper emotional slur, they both laughed. To be honest, there had been one chat on the moonlit steps of the Museum, but all of this went down on the blue fraternity-paper among other confidences.

One afternoon, in the middle of a Spring-time walk, Smith gave utterance to a decision concerning which he had already written, dutifully, to an interested party in the South. They had passed the willow-fringed bank of Lagunita, the red boathouse, the double avenue of young pines, and, crossing into the back road, strolled down to the low gate opposite the Farm; this they climbed and came into a little hollow where knowing people find yellow violets. He had just given her a frank compliment.

"You are the best fence-taker I ever saw for a girl."

"That's one practical result of an hour's credit in gym-work," she laughed. "Sometimes, on lovely days like this, I feel almost as though I could pole-vault the way you do. It must be glorious to go sailing over the bar."

"And hear it come clattering down after you?"

They sat on the soft, new grass, and Lillian caught, one after another, the shy yellow faces peering at her through the long leaves. She looked so spring-like, so much a part of the fresh, young landscape in its robes of early February, as she half reclined to reach out for a blossom larger and yellower than the rest—a pose that she knew was good—that the Sophomore president put an end to suspense.

"I had expected to lead the cotillion with Miss Martin," he began, "but she has gone South, so I'm badly left. I'm afraid you are engaged for it, aren't you?"

Lillian gazed fixedly at the white cupola on a stockfarm building. Her heart was somewhere deep in hill-grass. She was the most luckless girl in the whole college! The opportunity of her Sophomore year had come too late. It was bitter enough for tears.

"I had promised it to Mr. Perkins," she said, irresolutely.

"I was afraid so. Of course, it was awfully late to ask you; but I would rather go with you than with any of the others, so I ventured."

It was a desperate moment for Lillian.

"I would rather go with you, too," she said, gazing up at him.

"I'm sure I wish you could," he said, with sincerity. She was at her prettiest that day.

"I will anyway," she declared.

"But Ted——"

"I don't care," she went on, "it was only that he asked me first. Couldn't I cut it and go with you? He ought to understand that I have a right to change my mind."

Smith watched the antics of a gopher for a full minute before he replied. Although Perkins had said nothing to him of his intentions regarding the dance—the two had few confidences—Cap had held his theories. Still, he deemed he had a chance. Being a Sophomore, he believed that he was thoroughly acquainted with the co-educated sex and all their wiles and guiles; but a feeling of repulsion toward this frank readiness to throw down another man, one of his own, too, drowned his sense of self-satisfaction at finding himself preferred.

"Of course, you and Ted must arrange all that," he said, and turned the conversation.

Cap's lack of confidential relations with Perkins did not stand in the way of his mentioning the affair to him that night after dinner.

"I thought you ought to know it, Ted," he concluded. "Of course, you will do as you please about the matter, only I shall not take her."

"You don't think for a moment that I still intend to, do you?" asked Perkins, fiercely.

"I don't believe I'd blame you exactly if you backed out," said the complacent Sophomore; "but, of course, it's none of my funeral now; I'm only sorry I happened to ask her myself, and start the trouble."

"I think I'll walk home with her after rehearsal," said Perkins.

"Well, I shan't say anything about it one way or the other," said Smith, and he started toward the Gym with a pleasant sense of having galled somebody a bit.

Meanwhile, Lillian had eaten her dinner with relish. The prospect of trouble with Perkins did not worry her in the least. Perkins had been rather a convenience, and to lead the cotillion with Jack Smith was a delight that entirely divested the other man of all importance. The rehearsal went through with a dash; Lillian was all animation and witchery, and the love-scene was perfectly acted, though Ted Perkins sat glowering in the privileged audience. Cap Smith took his high note with a tenderness of voice and gesture that moved Connor, the leader (he was also stage-manager and chief electrician), to call out, "Good boy, Cap," and to shake his carefully untrimmed hair in approval.

After rehearsal, the tenor slipped away just as Perkins, with an artificial smile, approached Lillian.

The Sophomore was in bed when Perkins came into his room.

"What did you do about it?" Cap asked, to start things.

"I simply said I wanted to be excused from taking her to the cotillion."

"What reason did you give?"

"None."

"But you had to give some explanation."

"She didn't ask for any. She guessed it, probably."

"What did she say? Try to smooth it over?"

"No, nothing, except that she was sorry, and that she would have liked to go with me."

"Humph," sniffed Cap. "I'll bet she was afraid I hadn't said anything to you about it, and she wouldn't give herself away as long as you didn't kick up a row. Now I suppose she expects me to take her."

"That's where she was keen, all right; she never breathed a word about you; only made me feel like two-bits in a fog for having turned her down."

"If I had been you I would have roasted her right there, fired the whole string at her."

This was the point for which the jilted man had come into Cap's room.

"No," said he, "you said you wouldn't take her either, and I thought that would punish her better than having any scene with me. She'll know I have had my innings."

This took Smith where he lived, but he put on a cheerful front, perforce:

"Well, I'll crawl gracefully out of it, to-morrow," said he. "I suppose she'll be hopping when she thinks it over."

Perkins went up to his room satisfied.

When Cap Smith caught Miss Arnold at the post-office, he began to find that it was easier to plan a graceful crawling out than to execute the movement.

"I shall have to take back what I said yesterday about the cotillion," he began, cleverly, guiding her toward Roble, "because, you see, it wouldn't be just square to Ted, would it? He might feel hurt, and I wouldn't have that. We must have six dances, though, anyway."

This, assuredly, would show her. Unfortunately, Lillian was either dull or desperate.

"But he released me last night."

"Did he?" said Jack. He had started all wrong.

"Yes, we settled it all very well; he didn't seem to care in the least, he is so good-natured." She looked as serene as the sky above her, although she was beginning to have biting suspicions. "So it's all right."

Cap Smith's feet had become tangled in crawling; he kicked out recklessly.

"No, it's not all right. I don't believe in a girl's treating a fellow like that, and I won't be a party to it."

"Why did you ask me, then?" she challenged. "To tempt me because you happened to be president and a girl loves to lead?"