ed. It's all over--all over.
I'm queered--queered forever!"

VII

Until dusk, like Gilliatt in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, waiting
for the tide to swallow him up, Stover sat motionless, brooding. There
was only one thing to do--to run away. His whole career had been
ruined in a twinkling. He knew. There could be no future for him in
the school. What he had done was so awful that it could never be
forgiven or forgotten. Why had he run? If only he had made a quick
dive at the ball as it had trickled off the glove and caught it before
it reached the ground, instead of standing there, horrified,
hypnotized. Yes, he would escape, run off to sea somewhere--anywhere!
But he wouldn't go home; no, never that! He would ship around the
Horn, like the hero in that dreadful book, Two Years Before the Mast.
He would run away that night, before the story spread over the whole
school. He would never face them. He hated the school, he hated the
Green, he hated every one connected with it!

A tap came on the door, and the voice of Butsey White said coldly:

"Open up! Fuzzy-Wuzzy's in the House; you're safe. Open up. I've got
to get ready for supper."

Stover drew back the bed, unlocked the door and waited with clenched
fists for Butsey to spring at him. Butsey White, whose tempestuous
rage had long since spent itself in hilarious laughter, as, indeed,
had been the case with the rest, thought it best, however, for the
purposes of authority, still to preserve a grave face.

"You're a fine specimen!" he said curtly. "You've had a beautiful day
of it."

"Yes, I have," said Dink miserably, "a beautiful day!"

Butsey, to whom the tragedy of the century was nothing but an
incident, had not the slightest suspicion of Stover's absolute,
overwhelming despair. Yet Butsey, too, had suffered, and profited by
the suffering.

"You better square up with Tough McCarty," he said, failing to read
the anguish in Stover's eyes. "You certainly were the limit."

"I hate him!" said Dink bitterly.

"Why?"

"He's a bully."

"Tough McCarty? Not a bit of it."

"He tried to bully me."

"Why didn't you let them in?" said Butsey, putting the part in the
middle of his hair with a dripping comb.

"Let them in!"

"Why, what do you think they'd have done to you?"

Stover had never thought of that. After all, what could they have done
to him?

"I didn't think----"

"Rats!" said Butsey. "They might have pied you on the bed; but tha