o-night he saw the
picture as plainly as if it were yesterday; no reminiscence had risen so
keenly before his eyes for years: pretty Mrs. Van Skuyt sitting beside
him--pretty Mrs. Van Skuyt and her roses! What had become of her? He
saw the crowd of friends waiting on the pier for their arrival, and
the dozen or so emblazoned classmates (it was in the time of brilliant
flannels) who suddenly sent up a volley of college cheers in his
honor--how plainly the dear, old, young faces rose up before him
to-night, the men from whose lives he had slipped! Dearest and jolliest
of the faces was that of Tom Meredith, clubmate, classmate, his closest
friend, the thin, red-headed third baseman; he could see Tom's mouth
opened at least a yard, it seemed, such was his frantic vociferousness.
Again and again the cheers rang out, "Harkless! Harkless!" on the end of
them. In those days everybody (particularly his classmates) thought he
would be minister to England in a few years, and the orchestra on the
Casino porch was playing "The Conquering Hero," in his honor, and at the
behest of Tom Meredith, he knew.

There were other pretty ladies besides Mrs. Van Skuyt in the launch-load
from the yacht, but, as they touched the pier, pretty girls, or pretty
women, or jovial gentlemen, all were overlooked in the wild scramble the
college men made for their hero. They haled him forth, set him on high,
bore him on their shoulders, shouting "Skal to the Viking!" and carried
him up the wooded bluff to the Casino. He heard Mrs. Van Skuyt say,
"Oh, we're used to it; we've put in at several other places where he
had friends!" He struggled manfully to be set down, but his triumphal
procession swept on. He heard bystanders telling each other, "It's that
young Harkless, 'the Great Harkless,' they're all so mad about"; and
while it pleased him a little to hear such things, they always made him
laugh a great deal. He had never understood his popularity: he had
been chief editor of the university daily, and he had done a little in
athletics, and the rest of his distinction lay in college offices his
mates had heaped upon him without his being able to comprehend why they
did it. And yet, somehow, and in spite of himself, they had convinced
him that the world was his oyster; that it would open for him at a
touch. He could not help seeing how the Freshmen looked at him, how the
Sophomores jumped off the narrow campus walks to let him pass; he could
not help knowi