ninety seconds. No one suspected that the
unshaven, disheveled boy was, in that studious, quiet place, having his
first great wrestle with life.

* * * * *

The football team, accompanied by the coaches, the Headmaster Brewster
and his wife, a half-dozen masters, and the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth
Forms almost in a body, in auto-hacks and horse-hacks, on foot and by
trolley, departed for the railroad station and Chancellor's Hill next
morning at eight, to the sound of cheers.

Dick Harrington stood in the great Archway with the Lower School and a
handful of other boys, like himself on probation (or just "broke"),
cheering the school, the team, "The Colonel," the manager, the school,
the team, and again and again "The Colonel," until the last boy was out
of sight. The team was hopeful of victory; the school was confident of
it. But "The Colonel's" face was curiously grave. He smiled and joked;
now and then he tossed some gay piece of derision into the crowd of
woe-begone stay-at-homes. But the gravity remained in the eyes all the
while. Harrington saw it, and it occurred to him that it was natural
that the Captain of The Towers football team should feel the weight of a
great responsibility; he was quite sure that "Colonel" Burton had never
seemed to him so heroic as to-day. There was no question about it. There
was an unusual nobility in Bill Burton's eyes and in the carriage of
his head. But there was also a curious impression of suffering there and
about the lips. Dick saw Mrs. Brewster look at Burton with a friendly,
somewhat quizzical, smile. Then in two minutes the fortunate ones were
gone and The Towers became a St. Helena, where a chill wind played
shrilly all day long around corners of buildings and in and out the
cloisters.

Lessons that morning were a gloom and dinner in the huge, half empty
dining-room offered an opportunity to satisfy the boy's hunger and--that
was all. As a social function it was a flat failure. Everybody talked of
the game, as wrecked sailors drifting in an open boat talked of shore.
Life was unreal somehow, everything so empty, so quiet. If, as some one
had once remarked, The Towers was a very furnace of flaming life and
energy--some one had certainly dumped the grate.

The game was to be called at Chancellor's Hill at one-thirty; and at
one-thirty the first stragglers appeared in the chilly Archway to take
their position at the bulletin board, where the sc