-" He stopped suddenly.
"I've caught what you mean." He laughed bitterly. "Parental jealousy.
All right! All right!"

"Jim, I don't want you----"

"Don't bother. I've heard all I can stand, Jane. Thank you." He
lurched out of the car and hurried away.

She called him. No answer. Waiting a moment, the girl sighed,
touched the self-starter and drove away.

Deacon had no idea of any lapse of time between the departure of the
car and himself in his cot prepared for sleep--with, however, no
idea that sleep would come. His mood was pitiable. His mind was a
mass of whirling thoughts in the midst of which he could recognize
pictures of his boyhood, a little boy doing many things--with a hand
always tucked within the fingers of a great big man who knew
everything, who could do everything, who could always explain all the
mysteries of the big, strange, booming world. There were many such
pictures, pictures not only relating to boyhood, but to his own
struggle at Baliol, to the placid little home in Philadelphia and
all that it had meant, all that it still meant, to his father, to
his mother, to him, Any act of his that would bring sorrow or dismay
or the burden of defeated hope to that home!

But on the other hand, the morrow was to bring him the crown of
toilsome years, was to make his name one to conjure with wherever
Baliol was loved or known. He knew what the varsity _cachet_ would
do for his prospects in the world. And after all, he had his own
life to live, had he not? Would not the selfish, or rather the
rigorous, settlement of this problem, be for the best in the end,
since his making good would simply be making good for his father and
his mother? But how about his father's chance for making good on his
own account?

A comrade in the cot adjoining heard a groan.

"Eh! Are you sick, Deacon? Are you all right?"

"Sure--dreaming," came the muffled reply.

There was something unreal to Deacon about the morning. The sunlight
was filled with sinister glow; the voices of the rowing men were
strange; the whole environment seemed to have changed. It was
difficult for Jim Deacon to look upon the bronzed faces of the
fellows about the breakfast table, upon the coach with his stiff
moustache and glittering eyeglasses--difficult to look upon them and
realize that within a few hours his name would be anathema to them,
that forever where loyal men of Baliol gather he would be an outcast,
a pariah.

That was what he would