e're sophomores."

"So we are! What do you know about that?" Hugh's eyes shone. "Gosh!"

Carl looked at his watch. "Hell, I've got to beat it." He picked up his
suit-case, dropped it, shook hands vigorously with Hugh, snatched up his
suit-case, and was off with a final, "Good-by, Hugh, old boy," sounding
behind him.

Hugh settled back into a chair. He had half an hour to wait.

"A sophomore.... Gosh!"

CHAPTER XIV

Hugh spent the summer at home, working on the farm, reading a little,
and occasionally visiting a lake summer resort a few miles away. Helen
had left Merrytown to attend a secretarial school in a neighboring city,
and Hugh was genuinely glad to find her gone when he returned from
college. Helen was becoming not only a bore but a problem. Besides, he
met a girl at Corley Lake, the summer resort, whom he found much more
fascinating. For a month or two he thought that he was in love with
Janet Harton. Night after night he drove to Corley Lake in his father's
car, sometimes dancing with Janet in the pavilion, sometimes canoeing
with her on the lake, sometimes taking her for long rides in the car,
but often merely wandering through the pines with her or sitting on the
shore of the lake and staring at the rippling water.

Janet was small and delicate; she seemed almost fragile. She did
everything daintily--like a little girl playing tea-party. Her hands and
feet were exquisitely small, her features childlike and indefinite,
except her little coral mouth, which was as clearly outlined with color
as a doll's and as mobile as a fluttering leaf. She had wide blue eyes
and hair that was truly golden. Strangely, she had not bobbed it but
wore it bound into a shining coil around her head.

Hugh wrote a poem to her. It began thus:

Maiden with the clear blue eyes,
Lady with the golden hair,
Exquisite child, serenely wise,
Sweetly tender, morning fair.

He wasn't sure that it was a very good poem; there was something
reminiscent about the first line, and he was dubious about "morning
fair." He had, however, studied German for a year in high school, and he
guessed that if _morgenschoen_ was all right in German it was all right
in English, too.

They rarely talked. Hugh was content to sit for hours with the delicate
child nestling in his arm, her hand lying passive and cool in his. She
made him feel very strong and protective. Nights, he