“Crœsus has had a mighty pretty lot of ponies sent up from Virginia,” and Haydock had answered, as he rummaged through the desk:—

“Good work,—I’ll have to look them over.”

Long practice had perfected the technique of their little game; its suggestion of mindless opulence was maddening to McGaw. He had very bitter feelings sometimes. Of late they had all come to an intense sort of focus upon Sears. For in him McGaw was able to detect every human attribute that he especially hated. Sears, on the other hand, though naturally inclined to regard the tutor as a serviceable, if unsightly, machine, became used to his high-strung, underfed personality. He would talk to him now and then, when the effort of concentration became impossible, ask his opinion of certain instructors and their courses,—whether this one was a “snap,” and that one a “stinker,”—what sort of frills he, McGaw, was going to get on his degree, and if he didn’t think the college was “a good deal of a fake, anyhow?” This sort of thing was infinitely more galling to McGaw than a business relation, pure and simple. He remembered that, with other men who interrupted the study hour from time to time, Wolcott talked rowing or horses or—what was even more bewildering—nothing at all, but fooled and laughed with easy intimacy. He resented Sears’s ponderous adaptability to his, the tutor’s, own special topics.

While these two were seeing so much of each other on this uneven basis, May came and went, bringing with it the Class Races and all the other spring novelties. Wolcott’s crew came in second in the race, with seven men in the boat. Some one had broken an oar, or a leg, or an outrigger,—some one always does,—and jumped overboard. So the order in which the four crews splashed over the finish line was, as usual, a tremendous surprise to the black crowd that stretched along the Harvard Bridge, and the sea wall, and the stable roofs back of Beacon Street. Everybody—especially the girls—said the man who jumped was a great, splendid fellow. He was, of course; but the crews and the man himself laughed a good deal when they heard it; they thought that the men who had to stay by a disabled boat and be beaten by half a length showed their sand.

One sweltering day in June, after the examinations had begun, Haydock found Sears in his room, staring helplessly at a small mountain of clothing that reared itself in chaos from his study floor. “What’ll I do?” he asked, mopping his face dejectedly with the tail of a coloured shirt.

“Why, what’s the matter with them?” Haydock turned over a gay straw hat with his foot.

“Oh, everything!” answered Sears; he was warm and cross. “They don’t fit, and they’re hideous, and no good, and in my way, and they make me sick.” He gave the pile a kick that spread it the length of the room.

“Why not let Crœsus have a whack at them?” suggested Haydock, thoughtfully.

“What!” Wolcott looked quizzical, astonished. “Oh, that would never do, Boy! It would be rotten for one college fellow to offer another one clothes.”

“I don’t see much difference between that and money.”

“Well, there is a difference, just the same. The money comes through the Secretary,—a sort of reward offered, and no questions asked. Anyhow, there’s something about money—something—Oh, you know what it is as well as I do! As soon as money belongs to you, it’s just as good as anybody’s.”

“Rather better, I should say.”

“Well, clothes aren’t.”

“Since you press me,” said Haydock, fishing among a heap of crumpled linen, “I feel obliged to possess myself of this extremely pretty necktie.” He smoothed a brilliant strip of crimson silk over his knee.

“Go on, Haystack,—what shall I do with them?”

“How many times does a simple statement have to be repeated to you before it penetrates?” Haydock rapidly began to bring a rough kind of order into the waste of shirts, neckties, odd gloves, and suits of clothes.

“Give them to Crœsus? That’s out of the question, me boy!”

Haydock worked hard a few moments in silence. Then he stood up, hot and dishevelled, but amiable, as he always was, and said, laughing:—

“That light grey suit, these shirts, those neckties, and this hat, in fact the best of this out-fit, is going this afternoon to Barrows, with a note from you. They will subsequently be presented to ‘It, Croœsus, Esquire.’” It amused Wolcott every now and then to have Haydock “boss” him. The clothes went, of course.

Two days later they returned. That is to say, the best of them did,—the grey suit, the coloured shirt, the straw hat, and one of the quieter neckties. Ernest McGaw, unspeakably jaunty, almost handsome, was inside of them.

Even before Wolcott’s bundle had enabled McGaw to blossom, like the season, into fine raiment, his whole appearance had undergone a subtle, indescribable change. Perhaps it was a recently acquired firmness of gait as he swung through the Yard to a lecture, or up the steps of Claverly to Sears’s room. Hitherto he had hated the approach to Claverly; there usually were men going in or coming out, who looked at him as they passed. Once he had found a whole group of them seated on the steps, and had walked twice round the block, rather than brush through to the door. Or it may have been the spiritual radiance that comes of good food and plenty of it, money in your pocket, and peace in your mind. At any rate, McGaw’s expression, whether it walked at you, or looked at you, or smiled at you, had, of late, become the outward and visible sign of a great inward happiness. Almost every minute of his day was dedicated to his work; yet he felt as if he were having for the first time leisure in which to breathe. By no means the least exquisite of his satisfactions was his first purchase of something unnecessary, a luxury, an extravagance; he bought one evening, in a dim musty corner of a Brattle Square bookstall, a second-hand copy of some Latin hymns for twenty cents. The demi-god who had caused such things to be—Barrows had spoken vaguely of “a friend”—had become to McGaw the occasion of the sun’s rising and the stars’ shining; through him, the earth revolved, and the college endured. McGaw was very religious; every night he prayed fervently for the man who was befriending him. To-day, when he left his room to walk down to Claverly, he had the uplifting glow of self-respect and good-will to men whose secret only barbers and tailors seem to know. Perhaps, just at first, he felt even more like a white elephant than one ordinarily does on getting into a fresh suit of grey, after wearing black for many months. But the sensation, coming as it did from the knowledge that he was conspicuously better, rather than worse dressed than most people, was not altogether an unpleasant one to McGaw.

Wolcott’s back was turned when he arrived. This fact made what followed even more unfortunate than it would have been had the somewhat astounding truth burst on Sears at the moment the tutor came into the room. For it enabled Wolcott to say, in his natural, off-hand tones, without looking away from his desk:

“Is that you, McGaw? Just sit down and wait a minute.” When his revolving chair finally did swing round, the transition was something very awful. Sears, in spite of his birth, and his bringing up, and his money, was, at times, to put it kindly, exceedingly “near to nature;” just now he behaved as one might fancy a naked Zulu behaving were an electric car or a steam-roller to dart suddenly across his path in the depths of an African jungle. He jerked back as if somebody had made a lunge at him, and held on to the arms of his chair. Then he looked quickly from side to side, at the door and windows, with his mouth open stupidly. His eyes, round, rounder, helpless, turned again and again to that dapper butterfly in the chair opposite, who got redder and redder until all the blood in his body boiled through his face and away, leaving him white, rigid, terrible. And Sears could make no sound, only a gasping effort, until all at once the entire situation seemed to gather fresh force and smite him anew. He stumbled from his chair, through the door, down the long hall, down the stairs, laughing, shrieking, cursing like a maniac, out into the street.

IV

“SEARS found Haydock studying at the club, and dragged him out of his chair, upstairs to a vacant room, and shut the door. Then he paced the floor like a caged lion, holding his hands to his head and exclaiming, whenever he could stop laughing long enough, that he had lost his mind. Every now and then, when words refused to come, he expressed himself by leaning against the wall, with his back to Haydock, and kicking the air behind him. Sometimes he pounded the door with his clenched fist. Haydock waited.

“I’ll never get over this,” Sears declared, “not if I live to be a hundred.”

“Well, don’t tell it backwards,” objected Haydock; “begin at the beginning.”

“There isn’t any beginning,” roared Sears; “it never began, I just looked around and found it there; it had been there all the time; you’ve seen it yourself.” He sat on the floor and rocked to and fro.

“I’m almost inclined to believe that you have lost your mind,” remarked Haydock.

“Just wait, just wait! You’ll be a gibbering idiot yourself when I tell you, only you’ll not believe me! You can’t believe me! I don’t believe it myself! Oh, if you’d only been there!—if you could have seen him! I was writing a letter at my desk when he came in, and told him to sit down. I didn’t even notice him, or what he had on, or anything; and when I turned around—when I turned around—” Wolcott gasped—“when I turned around, I thought it would be McGaw!”

“Oh, go on, who was it?”

“It was McGaw! I’ll never get over the shock of it.” Haydock wrinkled his forehead at this clew.

“Can’t you guess? Don’t you know? Doesn’t something tell you? Try, try! think of the only person in college he could be, if he weren’t himself. Think of the only way I could have found out, the thing that made the difference—the—”

“He isn’t—he isn’t?”—Haydock stuffed his fingers in his ears and shrieked.

“He is, he is!” bellowed Sears. Then they both yelled, and made such a noise that the fellows downstairs came running up to see what was going on.

But they didn’t tell them. They couldn’t, in the first place, and the fellows wouldn’t have understood if they had. The McGaw-Crœsus episode was one of those little interpolated experiences two people own together so completely that they can’t share it if they want to. This one happened to be the kind over which the partners could laugh. When it happens the other way,—when two people get together and cry,—it isn’t nearly as valuable a factor in the divine accident of friendship; there is always one of them who very selfishly does most of the crying. For a time there was only mirth over McGaw. It was natural enough that Wolcott should have but a one-sided appreciation of the affair; he had made a discovery, he had been surprised, he had found it very startling and absurd. It was not to be expected that he would stop laughing to consider McGaw’s feelings in the matter. And Haydock, who was usually thoughtful and considerate, treated the revelation as he did at first, because it had come to him through Wolcott’s eyes. Only when his interest in detail prompted him to ask questions, did he begin to reconstruct the scene in Wolcott’s room, and feel intensely sorry for McGaw.

“What did you say when you turned around and first saw the clothes?” he asked Wolcott.

“Say? I didn’t say anything, I just looked, and wondered if the exams had gone to my brain.”

“Didn’t he do anything?”

“Why, of course not; what did you suppose he’d do? Tell me that he’d changed his shirt? I could see that for myself; heaven knows I almost dropped dead!”

“Well, you certainly didn’t just sit there staring at the man, did you?”

“Sit there? If I’d sat there another second, I’d have yelled in his face. I crashed out of the room and exploded in the hall. I came over here to find you.”

“Do you mean to say he’s in your room yet, waiting?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,—I wouldn’t go back to look for gold and precious stones.”

“What do you suppose he thought?”

“Lord, I don’t know,—I don’t care what he thought! What do you suppose I thought?” Wolcott laughed.

“But if you ran out of your room that way, and laughed in the hall, as you say you did, he must have known you were laughing at him,” said Haydock, gravely.

“Why certainly he did! I don’t suppose the creature thought I was throwing a fit like that just for exercise. What difference does it make anyhow?” Sears went on indifferently. “I’ll never see him again. To-day’s the last time he was coming to tutor me,—‘the exam’ is to-morrow; I’ll send him a cheque for what I owe him, and there you are.”

“But he must have thought you were laughing at him because he was dressed up,” persisted Haydock.

“Well, damn it, I was! If he hadn’t come looking as fine as a drunken shoemaker in my old clothes, I never should have known!” McGaw’s emotions didn’t contribute in any way to Wolcott’s enjoyment of his discovery,—why should Haydock branch off and make such a tiresome point of them!

“It’s too bad you offended him that way,” Haydock reflected; “for of course he must be frightfully offended. He’s utterly in the dark about the thing,—he wouldn’t have worn the clothes to your room if he weren’t; and he just thinks he looks like an overdressed fool in them. He’ll go home and take them off, and never wear them again.”

“Then he certainly will be a fool,” answered Wolcott, a trifle sulkily. “He looked extremely nice in them. If I’d known how well they looked on, I shouldn’t have given them away.” He spoke as if he were perfectly insensitive to McGaw’s probable anger and mortification; but Haydock knew that he wasn’t.

“It’s funny, of course; but I’m mighty sorry it happened.” The more Haydock thought of the way Sears had behaved, the more it worried him. “You can insult your friends without its making any particular difference, I suppose; they either refuse to take you seriously, or insult back, just as they please. But McGaw’s different,—he’s a defenceless, pathetic sort of a creature, and tremendously sensitive; I could see that whenever I met him in your room. He’s the kind of fellow that makes you feel that ‘something ought to be done about it.’”

“I think I have done a little,” suggested Wolcott, embarrassed at referring to his own good works, yet desirous of defending himself.

“It doesn’t put you in a better light with McGaw though; and his feelings aren’t any the less hurt on that account. All he thinks is, that he made a ridiculous exhibition of himself in somebody else’s clothes, and that you were coarse and heartless about it.”

“I’m afraid you flatter me,” muttered Wolcott.

“Come, now, Searsy, you know, just as well as I do, how people feel when you laugh at them.”

The Magnificent One’s laugh, when exerted upon certain temperaments, was indeed a terrifically effective engine. Wolcott’s sense of ridicule was not fine; it was powerless to discover the one vulnerable spot and stab neatly. But if it couldn’t dissect, it could crush like a boulder toppling from a precipice. “Remember poor little Bemis!” Wolcott coloured; he had once bet that he could make little Bemis cry inside of fifteen minutes, without touching him. That he had won the bet in eleven minutes and six seconds was a success of which he was not very proud. “This isn’t as bad as that time,” Haydock went on; “because you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“It was beastly, though,—wasn’t it?” said Wolcott, slowly, after a moment. He got up and looked out of the window, while Haydock sat and smoked in silence. “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s not talk about it any more,” he said at length, turning around. “If you can think of anything that I ought to go and do about it, tell me, and I’ll do it.” He left the room, and, in a minute or two, Haydock heard the front door slam behind him.

“What to do?” thought Haydock. The occasions that would have made his interference in the matter anything but an elaborate bit of patronising, were lacking. Haydock never saw McGaw in the ordinary course of events. To explain things, he would have had to seek him out, and begin in a way that would have sounded to the tutor like: “See here, my good man,”—that of course would hardly do. Besides, if amends were in order, Sears was the proper person to make them. The conception of Sears apologising to McGaw was sublime; Sears actually apologising,—Haydock imagined him setting his teeth, and blurting out the fewest possible words in which he could frame a perfunctory sentence of regret. That wouldn’t do, either. Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to rectifying other people’s mistakes—he made very few himself—was quite at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without being talked to by some one. Wolcott had shown that he was “sorry,” as plainly as he ever condescended to express that state of mind. The sensible course, perhaps, was to forget the rest as soon as possible. This Haydock attempted to do.

But it was far from easy. He and Wolcott went abroad together that year. Wolcott wanted to divide the summer between Dinard and Paris. Haydock had long wished to take a bicycle trip among a lot of Italian towns that, as Wolcott told him, no one but he “and another know-it-all who wrote a guide-book about them ever heard of before.” They compromised on the Italian towns. All through the long vacation McGaw, and what Haydock believed to be the type he represented, intruded upon Haydock’s meditations at the oddest hours and in the most unlikely places. For the first time he understood something a man had said to him the summer before:—

“Why on earth are you going to spend your vacation in central Siberia?” Haydock had asked him.

“Because I want to find out what I really think about Harvard,” the man had answered, laughing. It wasn’t exactly necessary for Haydock to go to Italy in order to think; but when, in August, he found himself loafing with Wolcott through a chain of dead little towns that some one had strewn along the hills and forgotten, he was able to discuss with himself,—and occasionally with his companion,—as he never had been before, more than one aspect of life in another little town that, had he known it, is quite as dead in August as any mediæval hamlet of the Apennines. The discussions were intensely serious, unsatisfactory, and in no way markworthy, except that they concerned themselves with Ernest McGaw in particular, and a background of shadowy strugglers Haydock and Wolcott didn’t know much about, that they referred to conveniently as “McGaws in general.” They were unable to dismiss the tutor from their minds; and when college opened again, McGaw was dazed one fine morning in November on seeing his own name on the first page of the “Crimson” among six other names—some of them well known—that, together with his, the “Crimson” announced, composed the Second Seven of the Signet.

It had been Wolcott’s suggestion entirely. He wasn’t a Signet man himself; but Haydock was, “which is practically the same thing,” as Wolcott said when he asked him to do what he could for McGaw. The plan of electing McGaw to the Signet had been such a simple matter for Haydock to carry out, that he couldn’t scare up a suspicion of the smug satisfaction he had always believed was the reward of having gone out of one’s way to do some one a good turn. Even when Wolcott came to him with the “Crimson” in one hand, and patted him on the head with the other, saying: “You—are—a—good—boy,” he didn’t have any of the nice priggish sensations he had been looking forward to investigating.

“No, I’m not,” he said to Wolcott. “It was too easy.”

“How did you manage it?”

“There wasn’t much need of management,” answered Haydock. “The First Seven is so dazzled by its own general brilliancy that it firmly believes that when it was elected, the list of really interesting men in the class was exhausted. So it goes in for proposing its personal friends who are congenial, without being ‘clever’ and ‘literary;’ and as nobody will vote for anybody else’s friends, they all get tired of black-balling people after a while, and compromise on some obscure and very deserving person none of them know at all. It was when everybody was tired of fighting, that I bucked in McGaw. I said he was a scholar,—he must be if he’s able to make you pass examinations; and I said that we would be keeping up the Signet’s tradition of electing representative men, if we got him in; and that the Faculty would like it; and that McGaw would give just the necessary tone of seriousness to the Signet that I feared we of the First Seven lacked. I said that, because people are always tickled to death to think they belong to something very serious, without being serious themselves. It was the speech of my life, I assure you. McGaw was elected, on the second ballot, without a murmur.”

“You’ll have to make him an honorary member, won’t you? Can he pay his initiation fee?” Wolcott asked, with elaborate innocence. Haydock answered by unbuttoning Wolcott’s coat and finding ten dollars in his card-case.

“Now sit down and enclose it in a nice little note to Barrows, so that Crœsus can have the satisfaction of paying it himself.” He led Sears by the coat to a desk, and dipped a pen in the ink.

“This highway robbery game is a perfect damned outrage!” said The Magnificent One, as he took the pen and began to write.

McGaw was bewildered and charmed at his election, for it is a great honour to belong to the Signet, although no one—especially the twenty-one members of the distinguished junior society—knows just why. He was also considerably upset by his unexpected translation; it demolished an entire system of dreary philosophy that he had built out of the struggles and bitterness of his freshman and sophomore years. He couldn’t, logically, go on thinking himself an obscure outcast, shut off from human interests, since he had become so pleasantly conspicuous in the public eye. Some unseen, unknown power had wished him well, and had done much for him; McGaw was happy, grateful, and, at first, mystified. But when the extra ten dollars for his initiation fee came through Barrows, he considered the mystery solved. He prayed enthusiastically that night—a great deal more than ten dollars’ worth—for the hallowed being whose goodness was unfathomable. He also laid awake an hour thinking up a suitable subject for his initiation “part.” Nothing that occurred to him seemed deep enough for so intellectual an institution as the Signet.

On the evening the Second Seven was initiated, Haydock—who developed an oppressive sense of responsibility for McGaw five or ten minutes before the fellow stood up to read his part—felt rather proud of him. McGaw’s turn came between a humourous effort in feeble rhyme, and a narrative that the writer sought to disinfect,—when he became aware that there were several instructors among his audience,—by explaining apologetically, that it was “from the French.” McGaw’s part was a dissertation on “The Vocabulary of Æschylus.”

“I was glad he did it,” Haydock said to Wolcott, when telling him about the initiation later in the evening at the club; “because I’d blathered so much about his being serious and a scholar. Why it was wonderful—monumental! Nobody understood a word of it, after the first page, and there were twenty-three pages. I counted them; I had to look interested in something. If there’s a solitary iota subscript in Athens this night that didn’t get ripped up the back and disembowelled, I’d like to shake hands with it, and ask it how it escaped. Professor Tenny went over to him afterwards; they had a lemonade orgy together and made Greek puns. McGaw had the grey suit on; he’s really a rather fine-looking sort of a chap; he doesn’t seem peaked and sticky out at the sleeves the way he used to be. All the fellows wooded up in great style; I’d given Ellis a long talk to death beforehand, and told him the whole thing,”—Wolcott made a face. “Oh, you don’t mind! Ellis is just the kind to think it sort of nice and Godsome. In fact, Ellis told me he was afraid he’d always misjudged you, and asked me what he’d better do about it.” They both laughed. “It’s funny,” Haydock went on, “the way fellows are willing to accept a man here if only you can get the right people to hustle around and say that he’s ‘somebody.’ I was thinking that to-night. Not one of those fellows had ever heard of McGaw until I sprung him on them; and Ellis went around telling everybody he had ‘a future before him,’—whatever that means. Ellis is perfectly happy, you know, when he can persuade himself that some one he has just met has a future before him. He thought I had, for about two weeks once. Well, what I began to say was that, in a small way, McGaw is right in the thick of things now. There’s no reason why those fellows shouldn’t like him; he seems really human in spite of Æschylus; and if they do take to him, he’ll probably make the O. K. and the Pudding, and wind up by being Class Day Orator. When I left, he was talking to that detestable snob, Baxford. Heaven only knows what they found to talk about; but Baxford was cackling his mindless cackle. They seemed to have plenty to say to each other; I didn’t disturb them. Isn’t it funny?”

It was “funny” to Haydock and Wolcott, although Wolcott, perhaps, wouldn’t have found it out by himself. When, a short time afterwards, the Editor-in-chief of the “Monthly” begged permission to print “The Vocabulary of Æschylus,” and the “Crimson” called it “a remarkably distinguished bit of research,” and the Signet remarked that real merit always found its level, Haydock and Wolcott got together and laughed, and were “just too cynical for anything,” as Ellis said, reprovingly. They laughed, too, when they met McGaw in the Yard or the Square,—somehow he had become a more familiar figure in the college scene,—and spoke to him. McGaw always had a cordial “hello” for Haydock alone. To Haydock and Wolcott together, he gave a somewhat stiff nod. Wolcott, unaccompanied, he ignored.

“That young man will succeed,” said Wolcott, one morning after he had been given—as he explained to Haydock—“the frozen eye twice, in front of Foster’s.”

“Any one who can afford to make a point of cutting you has succeeded,” laughed Haydock. McGaw’s independence and “cheek” pleased them both exceedingly.

Haydock had some foundation for his remark. McGaw was prosperous; he was happy; to many of his classmates, he had become something of a personage. He followed “The Vocabulary of Æschylus” in the “Monthly” by “Life and the Classics,” and “Hellas and the Athletic Question” in the “Advocate,”—two intelligent essays that were happy in creating varied opinions among the readers of the college papers, and in causing his name to be added very soon to the list of the “Monthly’s” editors. There are few institutions in college through which one’s tether, so to speak, can be more indefinitely extended than through the Signet and the college press. McGaw’s acquaintance became large and eclectic. It brought him work,—tutoring of all kinds,—more than he could undertake. It gave him an interest in college activities, and an intimate knowledge of them that enabled him to supply several Sunday newspapers with columns of unimportant but lucrative information and journalistic rigmarole. It made it possible for him at length to return to Barrows one of the periodical remittances and something additional, in payment of what he preferred to consider his debt. Barrows gave Wolcott, and Wolcott gave Haydock, and Haydock gave Wolcott’s sister the note that went with it. Between the lines they all read the fine feeling that McGaw, with even finer feeling, had delicately suggested. McGaw was nearing the crest of the wave. The grinds of the class, in discussing him, conceded to him a dubious facility for getting high marks in his studies, and a somewhat frivolous knack of impressing people favourably. But they agreed that, at last analysis, he lacked the instincts of a true scholar. The other men told one another that he was “a terrible grind, but a darned nice fellow!”—which was another way of saying he was “really human, in spite of Æschylus.”

Haydock had taken the fellow’s measure when he said that of him. The tutor was thoroughly “human.” He was inclined to like most of the men he had met at the Signet in a frank, simple way that demanded nothing, and ended by getting much; with corresponding naturalness, he liked being liked by them. Moreover, the dreariness of his first two years left no more permanent effect on him than the horrors of a January passage leave on a traveller who at length reaches port. McGaw proved himself a normal young person, by the comfortable manner in which the general hopelessness of his past situation receded from his memory, and left behind it one or two sharp details of a purely personal nature. He didn’t, for instance, recall very vividly how it felt to go more or less hungry for several days at a time; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t pass Wolcott on the street without tingling all over with anger and contempt. The recollection of Wolcott’s treatment of him refused to soften and fade; the sound of Wolcott’s insolent laughter never grew faint. McGaw still felt bitterly toward Wolcott. The tutor was human enough; and he hadn’t begun to show how human he could be. He was something like the little girl who, on being told that she had big eyes, answered, “Well, if you think they’re big now, you just ought to see me open them really wide once.” Whenever McGaw came across Wolcott, he thought of a remark a certain terrible old man used to make to his enemies:—

“You’ll all have a chance to get back at me if you live long enough,” this terrible old man was in the habit of saying encouragingly. “The only trouble is, so many of you seem to die at seventy.” McGaw often hoped that he wouldn’t be cut off at that age without having had a slap of some kind at Wolcott. So, although he didn’t exactly seek an opportunity, he was by no means blind to it when it presented itself, which it did with gratifying despatch.

There was the usual delay that year in electing the third and last seven of the Signet. The first two sevens had met three or four times, ostensibly for that purpose; but either there wasn’t a quorum, or some one had always played the piano, or read Kipling, or Maupassant, or Catulle Mendes aloud, or given a lively rendering of the dramas then playing at the Bowdoin Square Theatre, or the Grand Opera House, until no one felt particularly business-like. It was pleasanter to drink beer, and smoke, and “listen to something,” than to squabble over seven men far into the night, until you began to yawn, and discovered that you didn’t care whether they or any one else ever got into the Signet. As time went on, Ellis and Haviland, the president, made several attempts to impress upon the society what Ellis called, “the gravity of the situation.” But almost every one knew the president too well to be in the least impressed, and Ellis’s gravity was never very infectious; so the Signet took its own time. When, at last, fourteen men turned up in the long, dingy room of the society one rainy night in May, and no one had brought anything to read, and the fellows who played the piano were disobliging, Haviland called them to order, at the earnest request of Ellis, secretary and treasurer, and declared that the first business to come before the meeting was the election of the Third Seven. Ellis looked conscious and aggrieved; he had written several pages of minutes in rhyme, and wanted to read them.

“You look rather well behind that desk, Haviland,” drawled a fellow named Baxford; “but you make a rotten president. The first business is the reading of the minutes.” Ellis smiled again.

“Not at all, not at all,” answered Haviland, unabashed, glancing at the secretary’s book; “I am only too well aware that Mr. Ellis has written a yard and a half of poetry for the occasion. I merely hesitated to classify so delightful a prospect under the head of business. If Mr. Ellis will give us the pleasure—”

“I move we adjourn,” interrupted Haydock and Dickey Dawson and Bigelow and a tall man every one called Tommy, all rising at once.

“I’m going to get a cup of chocolate,” announced some one else. “Ellis’s poetry is always so sensual, I can’t listen to it unless I quaff thick, sweet, ’lucent syrups tinct with’ granulated sugar.”

“Have the things come?” asked Haviland, abruptly dropping what he considered his parliamentary manner.

“Yes, and there’s beer,” answered Baxford, who was sitting where he could lift the faded red portière and look into the other room. The meeting, led by the president, stampeded, leaving Ellis pounding on the table, and endeavouring to make himself heard above the uproar. He was imploring them to “be serious just for a few minutes.” Haydock stuck his head between the curtains.

“That’s what they call ‘Harvard indifference,’” he said, and disappeared.

They wasted, according to Ellis, three-quarters of an hour over beer and chocolate, and wouldn’t have come to order again at all, if he hadn’t begged them separately to do so as a personal favour to him. Then they consumed almost as long again in interrupting the reading of the minutes, to criticise gravely Ellis’s versification, to discuss his “conception of life,” as based on his doggerel lines, and to call attention, wherever poor Ellis had indulged in anything that bordered on “fine” writing, to what Tommy referred to as, “Those subtle obscenities the author has sought, with ghoulish depravity, to disguise in the bombastic periods of a Milton or an Alfred Austin.” They moved that Ellis be “expelled from the aristocracy of intellect, and sent to the Annex, there to be kissed in the face until dead,” and refused to allow the meeting to proceed until the motion had been put and lost by a unanimous vote. Baxford created an inexpensive diversion by throwing a pack of cards into the air, turning up his coat-collar, and exclaiming, as they fell on his head:—

“B-r-r-r-r, how the storm rages without! Think, lads, of the poor sailors on such a night!” Dawson set fire to the portières, because, as he explained, Ellis had said something in his poem about a “lurid glare,” and he wanted to see what they were like. The conflagration was put out with beer, and Ellis was fined three dollars for “perverting youth.” McGaw enjoyed the noise and fooling as much as any one. He didn’t quite know how to stir up that sort of thing himself; but he was no more anxious than the rest to get to the serious business of the meeting.

It was late when they finally began to nominate the Third Seven. There were in all sixteen names proposed. An informal vote was taken on them,—“a sort of preliminary canter,” as Haviland said, “just to find out what the general feeling was.” The ballots were playing-cards, cast in Ellis’s hat (when, later in the evening, its brim was torn off during a playful discussion, Ellis was fined another dollar for the ensuing delay). Baxford’s room-mate, Anderson, was the first man voted on.

“Although he isn’t just the sort of a man who would be chosen for the first two sevens,” said Baxford, in his little speech just before the hat was passed around, “he’s really a perfect corker. He doesn’t ‘do’ anything in particular; but I’ve known him a long time, and he’s the most amusing sort of a chap, when he wants to be; and—and I think he’d be a mighty good sort of a man to have on.”

Of the fourteen votes cast for Anderson, thirteen of them were black.

“As an indication of feeling,” remarked Tommy, “the informal ballot is easily a success.”

“Not quite ‘in touch’ with the Signet, I’m afraid,” said Baxford, good-naturedly. Some one moved to drop all names getting six or more black balls, and this, after the first round, decreased the number of candidates to nine. McGaw had put up a man named Carver, one of the editors of the “Monthly.” The nomination was a discreet one, for Carver was neither obscure nor very well known. He was the kind of person they almost all dimly remembered having met at one time or another, in the rooms of fellows they liked. This isn’t knowing much about a man; but, at least, it isn’t knowing anything against him. Then McGaw’s manner of indorsing him was distinctly good. He managed to give the impression of having honestly picked out Carver, not because he was Carver’s friend, but because he thought the Signet was on the lookout for that kind of man. He seemed to wish, in a modest way, to please the Signet.

“I can’t say that I’ve known him very long, or well,” said McGaw, thoughtfully (the others had made a point of having been more or less born and brought up with their candidates); “but since I’ve been on the ‘Monthly,’ I’ve seen something of him. He’s a pleasant sort of a fellow, and he writes pretty good stories every now and then; although I don’t think he’s what you would call ‘literary’ exactly. He isn’t very prominent; that might be an objection,” he went on, unconscious of the implied flattery; “but I decided to put him up because I thought he seemed like a good man, and that some of you who know of him might like to consider him.”

“I know him,” spoke up Haydock, glad of a chance to help on McGaw’s candidate. “I thought of him myself. He would fit in very well.” Ellis, too, had a good word to say. Carver was then voted on.

“Fourteen red and no black,” announced Haviland from the desk. The crowd clapped; and McGaw felt the little thrill born of an awakened sense of importance and power in the community.

It took an hour and a half to elect the next four men,—an hour and a half of eulogy, discussion, diplomacy, compromise,—although, as time went on, the increasing indifference of the majority of the fellows as to who got in tended to reduce the election here and there, among those who really cared, to the process of voting “for your man, if you’ll vote for mine.” Not that the arrangement did away with animated electioneering in different corners of the room, and vehement arguments that might never have ended had not some weary outsider called attention to the fact that they had long since ceased to have any bearing on anything. But it gave a coercive publicity to pigheadedness in various quarters that made a Third Seven possible. At midnight, five men had been elected, two places remained unfilled, and the list of candidates numbered four. Then, by a curious revulsion of feeling no one sought to explain, three of the names that had hung on with a fair chance of success until that late hour, were unmercifully black-balled in rapid succession and thrown out. This left but one candidate—a man named Leonard—and two vacancies. The hat went around again bringing back to the desk, among twelve other cards, the ace of spades and the queen of clubs. Two black-balls, if persisted in, kept a man out of the Signet.

“Now we’ll have to think up some one else. Oh, Lord!” yawned Haviland. “Leonard has had two black for hours; I think he’s hopeless. Somebody suggest somebody else.”

Ellis glanced at Haydock as much as to say, “Now’s your time.” He had been doing that, off and on, all evening, until Haydock at last refused to look in his direction. Haydock was on the point of attempting something rather impossible, and he didn’t propose to ruin his chance of success at the outset, merely by being ill-timed. He had decided a week before,—as soon as the postal cards calling for an election were sent out,—that he wanted Sears Wolcott on the Signet. His reasons for getting Sears there were not obvious, and Haydock appreciated the difficulties that lay in the way of making them appear so, or of giving any reasons at all other than that he wanted him. His best motives for wishing to “buck” Sears in were hardly formulated in his own mind; he couldn’t very well undertake to make them clear to others, even if they would have carried with them any weight,—which they wouldn’t have. He was influenced wholly by the same feeling for Wolcott—a mixture of admiration and fond disapproval—that had led him the year before to do what he could to interest The Magnificent One in Barrows’s unfortunate. The little experiment had done something for Wolcott,—a good that perhaps only Haydock and Wolcott’s sister appreciated as yet, but something that was, nevertheless, worth while. Wolcott’s horizon had given a little here and there; Wolcott himself was somewhat less intolerant; he had ceased noticeably, to Haydock at least, to be actuated in everything he said and did by a kind of American adaptation of the ante-French Revolutionary opinion, that human beings began with barons. He was still a selfish high-handed youth,—no one knew it better than Haydock. But his friend found him neither as egoistic nor as arrogant as he had been; and he drew his own inferences. As for getting Wolcott into the Signet—Haydock wished to go on with what he had begun. The junior society seemed made to his hand. He not only looked forward to throwing Wolcott and McGaw together again,—on a basis of equality, this time,—he wished to put Wolcott in the way of having to see something of fellows who had a variety of interests strikingly different from his own, and who came together now and then to talk and read about them. Wolcott came in contact with men of many tastes at his clubs; but the club ideal was, after all, the placid, unimaginative ideal of fifteen or twenty pleasant young men with plenty of money, it was only too easy to live up to. Haydock had no misguided veneration for the Signet as a learned or even a very clever institution; an undergraduate literary society could hardly be one or the other. He did appreciate, however, the curiously diverse character of its components, and the semi-serious intellectual friction that went on there. For the good of Wolcott alone, he hoped to get him on the Third Seven. The attitude was quixotic, inasmuch as it was rather sentimental and as absurd as only a thoroughly fine attitude can be. Haydock had talked several men into promising to vote for Wolcott, should his name come up; and Ellis, from a variety of strange Christian motives, had done the same. Ellis had become enthusiastic over Wolcott since he had learned of the McGaw affair; whereas, formerly, he had denounced him as a selfish beast, he now called him a “temperament.”

“Do propose somebody—anybody,” repeated Haviland. “I’m so sleepy!” Two of the men had stretched themselves on the sofas, with the request that they be waked in time to vote.

“Let’s only have six on the Third Seven; it would be so quaint,” suggested Tommy.

“I think I’d even vote for Baxford’s room-mate if he were put up again,” said Dickey Dawson.

It was just this apparent willingness to elect any one and get away, that Haydock had been waiting for. He stood up.

“I can’t think of any one who seems exactly cut out for the Signet, any more than the rest of you can,” he said; “but I don’t see why that ought to make so much difference on the Third Seven. Why not get on somebody like Tony Wilson or Jack Linzee or Sears Wolcott,—not necessarily any of those three, but some one like that. They’re athletes, you know, and people outside will think we’re trying to be representative,—that always sounds well, and, besides, they’re all good fellows. Any one of those men would be surprised and pleased to be elected, I feel sure.”

“Yes,—they did that last year,” added Ellis. “Martin was a Signet man, and he used to go to all the meetings and everything, and he was nothing but an athloot. People laughed at first, but they thought it rather nice. I’ll vote for any of those fellows.”

“Well, I nominate Sears Wolcott,” called some one from the sofa,—one of the men who had pledged himself to Haydock. “I know him pretty well, and shouldn’t mind seeing him in.”

“Buck him in,—buck him in!” said two or three others, impatiently.

“And whoever’s been black-balling Leonard all evening, for Heaven’s sake don’t next time,” added Haviland.

Haydock was relieved that it hadn’t been necessary for him to nominate Wolcott directly, and that there was but little preliminary discussion of his fitness for election. One or two men did attempt to agitate his probable lack of sympathy with everything the Signet stood for, but the tendency to hurry the meeting along prevailed. A vote was called for. Haydock involuntarily glanced at McGaw, for he knew where the strongest opposition would come from. But McGaw’s face was non-committal as to future intentions. The hat went around. Haviland and Ellis assorted the cards.

“Ten red and four black,” announced Haviland, with a groan. The result was better than Haydock had expected. One of those black votes he knew would never be changed; but the other three might be tired out, as he and Ellis had combined to hold at bay every other candidate as long as Wolcott was in the running.

“Now for another go at Leonard,” said Haviland, wearily. “Just what he had before, twelve red and two black,” he added when the hat came back to the desk. “Who is doing it? Get up and curse him out like a man; it’s a shame, when all but two are willing to have him in.” But no one got up and cursed. Haydock and Ellis were the guilty ones, and they had nothing against Leonard. No one else was nominated; and Haydock said a few words about Wolcott before his name was voted on a second time. His manner in saying them was the artistic bit of hypocrisy he felt the occasion demanded. Willingness under the circumstances, rather than eagerness, was what he sought to express. He knew the value of his own conservative personality.

“Wolcott gets eleven red and three black,” announced Haviland; “one better than last time.” Another ballot on Leonard’s name brought it no nearer election than before. Haydock was quietly exultant. The election was slowly coming to the point to which he had all along looked forward to bringing it. The fellows who had promised to vote for Wolcott—indifferent at first as to whether he got in or not—were beginning now to “root” for him vigorously. Incited solely by a desire to have their own way, they tried to find out who was black-balling him, and made speeches urging his election that Haydock wouldn’t have dared to make. Their eloquence succeeded by the next ballot in reducing the number of his black-balls to two. One of them, of course, was McGaw’s. The other, Haydock felt equally sure, had been put in by Bigelow. Leonard had been Bigelow’s candidate from the first. Bigelow hadn’t disguised his enthusiasm for him since he had nominated him early in the evening; he had, in fact, declared good-naturedly that if the worst came to the worst, he would black-ball his own father in order to get Leonard in. Once when he didn’t happen to have any black cards in his hand, he had asked some one to black-ball Wolcott for him. It was undoubtedly he, thought Haydock, who furnished the second black-ball, and continued to put one in every time a ballot was taken on Wolcott’s name. There was no reason why Bigelow shouldn’t withhold it on the next ballot, Haydock told himself, if he, Haydock, and Ellis showed themselves willing to vote for Leonard. This would elect Bigelow’s candidate unanimously, and let Wolcott in with McGaw’s one black. So just before Leonard’s name was voted on again, Haydock went over to Bigelow and said frankly:

“Drop in a red card for Wolcott next time, and as far as Ellis and I are concerned, Leonard will be elected at once. We two have been keeping him out right along.” Bigelow looked surprised, then laughed and nodded as if he understood such things, and in a moment Leonard, amid a murmur of relief from the crowd, was declared elected. Once more the hat was handed from man to man. They were electing Wolcott now, actually electing him, thought Haydock. He noticed that Bigelow voted with the seven of hearts, then he looked in McGaw’s direction to see how the tutor would take the news of Wolcott’s success when Haviland should announce it from the desk. It was very late, and the rickety old room had grown chilly in spite of the two blazing chandeliers. Three or four of the men had put on their coats and hats; the meeting seemed about to end.

“Wolcott gets twelve red and two black,” said Haviland, hopelessly.

“What!” exclaimed Ellis. Haydock turned incredulously toward the desk; he felt as if some one had played him a sneaking trick. He went over to Bigelow, astonished and rather angry.

“You voted for Wolcott, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Why, yes, of course I did,” answered Bigelow, irritably. Now that his own candidate was safe, he was anxious to go home. “I’ve been voting for him ever since he was put up, except just the first round.” Haydock swore. He had taken it for granted that Bigelow had been keeping Wolcott out when, as a matter of fact, it had been some one else,—some one who no doubt was in complete sympathy with McGaw. His jump at the conclusion struck him now as an incredibly dull proceeding.

“I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” Haviland was saying. “We simply must have a seventh man. I hate to have the thing drag over until ‘next time,’ when we’re all here to-night. Nominate Tony Wilson, or Jack Linzee—somebody—anybody.”

“I nominate Tony Wilson!” drawled Baxford, obediently. Haydock and Ellis ostentatiously gave the new candidate the only two black-balls he received. Haviland grasped the situation at once.

“I think we’ll have to come to some sort of an understanding,” he said. He was tired and annoyed, and so conscious of the fact that he forced himself to be extraordinarily polite. “Two of us apparently want Wolcott enough to cause a deadlock,—which I suppose is perfectly justifiable,—and two of us don’t want him at all. Lots of things have been said in his favour, and no one has said much of anything against him. I think it’s only fair for the two fellows who are keeping us here so late to get up and give us some idea of why they don’t want him. We can’t very well throw his name out as long as he has only two black. If the fellows who are keeping him out have a really good reason, we ought to know it. Such things, I’m sure, won’t go beyond this room.” There was a pause, while Haviland looked inquiringly from face to face. Then McGaw stood up. There was just a trace of defiance in his general bearing that vanished as soon as he saw that every one had turned toward him with interest.

“I suppose I ought to have objected to Sears Wolcott earlier in the evening,” he said slowly. He looked quietly, fixedly, at Haydock. “I have met him in a way that none of you could meet him. I wish I didn’t know that he was one kind of a fellow with men who have money and friends and everything, and different with the other kind,—men who can’t afford such things. I’m very sorry that I’ve seen him laugh at a man because he was poor and underfed and dressed in somebody else’s clothes,—clothes that didn’t fit him; because I can’t forget it now, when I should like to. I can’t think that he has a good heart. I don’t want to meet him here.” McGaw said this very slowly and regretfully; and when he sat down he stared at the floor. His little speech left every one wide-awake and uncomfortable, and so silent that the fellows could hear the rain slapping in gusts against the window-panes outside. His words in the mouth of—say Baxford or Dickey Dawson would have been laughed at. As it was, Tommy murmured audibly, “‘Kind hearts are more than coronets,’” but the observation fell rather flat. McGaw had been painfully sincere. He had succeeded, beyond a doubt, in “getting his effect.” Haydock knew that just that sort of thing said about Wolcott, by some one who was liked rather than otherwise, and who more or less represented “the extreme left,” was peculiarly fatal. No one else in the room would have talked in that way under any circumstances, although there were several men who didn’t object to hearing it done so authoritatively. Wolcott, who had seemed to be on the verge of slipping into the Signet a moment or two before, was now given seven black-balls, and dropped without comment. Tony Wilson was elected with a feeble burst of applause; Haydock and Ellis were putting on their overcoats when the hat went around, and didn’t vote.

Haviland turned out the lights, and the men groped their way—holding on to one another and striking matches from time to time—down the two flights of steep, dark stairs to the wet street. No one spoke of the election on the way down. Had anything been said it would have had to do, undoubtedly, with McGaw’s speech; and McGaw was there, somewhere in the dark, with the rest of them. Haviland walked with Ellis and Haydock as far as the “Crimson” office,—he hoped to get the names of the Third Seven into the morning paper. But they didn’t talk of the election. Ellis was boiling with righteous indignation; Haydock was wondering who had been McGaw’s ally in black-balling Wolcott; and Haviland was too glad to have it over with, and be out in the fresh air, to think of the Signet. It was not until Haydock and Ellis threw some fresh wood on the fire at the club, and sank into two big leathern chairs, that they felt at liberty to discuss the matter freely.

“I suppose it was hopeless from the first,” mused Haydock.

“It needn’t have been,—that’s what makes me furious,” returned Ellis. “If McGaw only could have had an inkling of who he was keeping out—”

“Yes, I think he would have been the first to turn right around and work like a pup to get him in,” agreed Haydock.

“I felt like jumping up and telling everything.”

“How awful,—think of the scene!”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been much more damnable than it was! Nobody knew where to look. There was just enough truth to what McGaw said—that and the way he got up and did it—it wasn’t as if anybody else had tried to—”

“The difference is that McGaw really cared,” broke in Haydock; “there was feeling behind it. It isn’t given to many of us to have real, sure-enough feelings around here in college. Nothing ever seems to happen that makes enough difference one way or the other. McGaw’s one of the kind that has them. That’s how he got everyone to vote for Carver the minute he put him up. He just felt all over that Carver was the right man for the place, and somehow everybody believed him. He slaughtered poor Searsy by the same method. You see he’s the sort of fellow who is destined to be listened to by all kinds of people. The masses like guts, while the upper classes prefer expression. McGaw has the intensity of a fanatic and the manners of a gentleman; his armament is formidable. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear some day that he’d started an entirely new and plausible religion, or written a book that really proved something, or reorganised the Supreme Court on a less flippant basis. The creature actually has beliefs; he’s rather astonishing. I can’t blame him for giving it to Wolcott in the neck, when he had such a good chance; but I’m darned sorry he was inspired to do it.”

“I suppose you’ll tell Sears all about it,” said Ellis.

“No, I sha’n’t,” answered Haydock, after a moment. “You see, you never can tell how he is going to take things—so what’s the use? The Signet’s nothing to him, and he might be ever so much amused that McGaw could keep him out of it. But then, again, it’s quite likely that he’d carry on and swear like a trooper, and never do anything for McGaw again. I know him better than you do. If I ever do tell him, it’ll be some day just after he’s won a bet, or beaten me at golf, or taken a prize at the horse show; not when he’s cooped up in his room with sore throat, the way he is now, railing at the weather and Cambridge and the college, and everybody who makes a sound in the hall near his door. I’m devoted to Searsy, but I don’t think I have many illusions about him.”

“Oh, I wish we could tell McGaw about him! It might make McGaw feel badly just at first; but I’d be so much more comfortable. Couldn’t we—just to be just?”

“Certainly not,” yawned Haydock. “One must have the courage to be unjust.”

And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the McGaw-Wolcott episode, if tailors didn’t exert such extraordinary influence over human affairs.

The next afternoon, when Haydock dropped into Wolcott’s room to see how the sore throat was getting along, he found Wolcott’s mother and sister had driven out from Boston on the same errand. Haydock’s call was opportune, for Wolcott, in a few minutes, had another visitor,—a somewhat agitated, incoherent young man who wished very much to speak to Wolcott alone. The Magnificent One would have granted the interview outside in the hall had not Mrs. Wolcott protested on account of draughts, so he took his guest into his bed-room, and shut the door.

“How very mysterious!” said Miss Wolcott. Her mother examined the closed door through her glasses. “Who is he?”

“That’s McGaw!” said Haydock, significantly.

“One of Sears’s friends?” asked Mrs. Wolcott. Haydock laughed.

“I never knew that he was,” he answered. Miss Wolcott seemed much interested; but her interest not nearly as eager as Haydock’s. McGaw’s visit baffled him. He couldn’t believe that the fellow had come, in a fit of remorse, to apologise to Wolcott for having kept him out of the Signet,—the idea was fantastic—ridiculous. Nor could he think it probable that McGaw had found out what Wolcott had been doing for him; no one but Barrows and Ellis and Miss Wolcott and Haydock himself knew. The long interview in Wolcott’s bed-room was indeed mysterious. It was something of a strain to Haydock to keep his attention from wandering to the rise and fall of voices on the other side of the door long enough to talk intelligently to Mrs. Wolcott; and when, after examining everything in the room, she said that, since she was in Cambridge, she thought she would improve the opportunity of making a call somewhere on Brattle Street, Haydock inwardly applauded the intention.

“He’s not nearly as ill as his note led us to believe,” said Mrs. Wolcott. “He wrote that he was ‘wasted away to a shadow,’ and that if we had a desire—from idle curiosity or any other motive—to see him alive, which he doubted, we’d better come out at once.”

“I was reassured,” added Miss Wolcott, “when I got a note by the next post, saying, ‘Dear Josephine, If you wear that dowdy old felt hat, with the black satin bow and the brass buckle, out to Cambridge, please sit downstairs in the vestibule, while I talk to mamma.’ Sears really ill is quite lamblike.”

“So you see, you mustn’t think me an unnatural parent for running away to leave a card on old Mrs. Burlap,” said Wolcott’s mother. Haydock saw her to the carriage, and went back to tell Miss Wolcott about the Signet meeting, and interest her still more in her brother’s visitor. He softened the language of McGaw’s speech a little, although he made its general import clear. His frequent talks with Miss Wolcott about Sears enabled him to.

“I agree with Mr. Ellis,” she said, when Haydock had finished. “I want McGaw to know. It does seem unjust to poor Searsy.”

“Maybe he does know,” replied Haydock, listening intently to the voices in the bed-room. Suddenly they ceased. Wolcott burst into his loud laugh, and both men began to talk again at once. “I wish they’d hurry up!” added Haydock, with suppressed excitement. Then the door opened, and McGaw, looking ill at ease, but smiling wanly, came out, followed by Wolcott, who went with him as far as the hall.

“And don’t come before ten o’clock,” Wolcott said, shaking hands. “I’m not often in early in the evening.” Wolcott, chuckling delightfully, came across the room, and laid a tiny oblong bit of white linen on Haydock’s knee. On it was printed the name of a Boston tailor, followed in handwriting by Wolcott’s name and a date and some cabalistic letters and numerals written in a clear round hand. Wolcott folded his arms and grinned. Haydock knew where it must have come from, yet he looked puzzled.

“But I remember distinctly having ripped it out that afternoon before you sent them around to Barrows,” he said, after a moment.

“Out of the coat,—not the trousers; they sew them under the right-hand pocket of the trousers sometimes,—so McGaw says,” Wolcott laughed like a child. “That pressed the button, so to speak, and Barrows, confound him! did the rest.”

“Well, well, well!” was all Haydock could say; he didn’t like to let Sears know that he had told Miss Wolcott, and that she was eager for details.

“Who was that who just went out, Searsy?” asked Miss Wolcott, innocently.

“That? Oh—a friend of mine,” answered The Magnificent One, winking at Haydock, as he took back the tailor’s label, and put it in his card-case.