From the broad open window the boy could see the western hills, already
gay with glistening autumn colour, shining under the glowing sunset sky.
The tall pointed pines, standing here and there in clumps, rose sharply
dark in the early gloaming of the valley.

"It's my chance," thought the boy, his eyes widening with enjoyment of
the beauty; "and, by Jove, I believe I've caught on!"

He got to his feet. The giddiness was gone. He flung off his
dust-stained garments, as if they held all of his past weakness and
misery. He plunged his head into the clear, cold water in the big basin
on the pine table; when he emerged, colour had mounted to his pale face,
and depression was a thing of the past.

"Hang it!" he exclaimed, rubbing his face and head with the rough towel
that he took from the back of a chair; "this is good enough for me. No
Green Lake in mine! I'll send for my trunk"--he had begun to whistle in
the pauses of his thought--"and put up my fight right here. Filmer's
good stuff; and there's a job ready-made for me, I bet! This is where I
was sent, and no mistake. What's that?"

It was the odours of supper, and Drew stood still, inhaled the fragrance
and grinned broadly.

"Gee whiz!" he cried; "I'm as hungry as a ditch digger." He dashed over
to his suit-case, opened it and pulled out the contents. A pair of
flannel trousers, a heavy flannel shirt and thick shoes were selected,
and soon Drew, radiant and revived, went forth from the disorder he had
created, eager for the meal that he heard Filmer placing on the piazza
table.

Drew was to eat many of Filmer's meals in the future; he was to learn
that Jock was a master-hand at cooking, but he was never again to know
just the positive joy that he felt during that first meal; for he
brought to it an appetite made keen by the hope of recovered health--the
health he had squandered so foolishly, poor fellow, while he was making
for his goal at college.

At last he tilted his chair back and laughed.

"I haven't eaten like that," he said, "nor with such enjoyment, since I
went tramping up in the Maine woods when I was a youngster."

Filmer was removing the empty dishes. There was a sense of delicacy
about his host that was compelling Drew's notice. He watched him
passing from kitchen to piazza, and he saw that he was big, strong and
handsome, but with a certain weakness, of chin, and a shyness of
expression that came and went, marring the general impression.

Fi