rn had almost arrived that
Deacon saw Jane Bostwick, and then his attention was directed to her
by her appearance with Junior Doane in one of the open French
windows at his right. Evidently the two had spent the evening in the
sequestered darkness of the veranda. No pair in the room filled the
eye so gratefully; the girl, tall, blonde, striking in a pale blue
evening gown; the man, broad-shouldered, trim-waisted, with the
handsome high-held head of a patrician.

A wave of something akin to bitterness passed over Deacon--bitterness
having nothing to do with self. For the boy was ruggedly independent.
He believed in himself; knew what he was going to do in the world.
He was thinking of his father, and of the fathers of that young man
and girl before him. His father was painstaking, honourable,
considerate--a nobleman every inch of him; a man who deserved
everything that the world had to give, a man who had everything save
the quality of acquisition. And Doane's father? And Jane Bostwick's
father?

Of the elder Doane he knew by hearsay--a proud, intolerant wholly
worldly man whose passions, aside from finance, were his son and
Baliol aquatics. And Jane Bostwick's father he had known as a boy--a
soft-footed, sly-faced velvety sort of a man noted for converting
back lots into oil-fields and ash-dumps into mines yielding precious
metals. Jim Deacon was not so old that he had come to philosophy
concerning the way of the world.

But so far as his immediate world was concerned, Junior Doane was
going out of the varsity boat in the morning--and he, Jim Deacon,
was going to sit in his place.

It came the next morning. When the oarsmen went down to the boathouse
to dress for their morning row, the arrangement of the various crews
posted on the bulletin-board gave Deacon the seat at stroke in the
varsity boat; Junior Doane's name appeared at stroke in the second
varsity list.

There had been rumours of some sort of a shift, but no one seemed to
have considered the probability of Doane's losing his seat--Doane
least of all. For a moment the boy stood rigid, looking up at the
bulletin-board. Then suddenly he laughed.

"All right, Carry," he said, turning to the captain of the second
varsity. "Come on; we'll show 'em what a rudder looks like."

But it was not to be. In three consecutive dashes of a mile each,
the varsity boat moved with such speed as it had not shown all season.
There was life in the boat. Deacon, rowing in p