cks, but he's the worst. On the reception committee! But they'll
take it out of him."

"Who? The reception committee?"

"No, the girls. They won't dance with him. He won't get a decent name on
his card. Roughneck, keeping Ed off the team. He's an Irish boy."

"An Irish boy?" Something, vague as an unforgotten dream that comes back
at night, though you are too busy to recall it in waking hours, urged
Judith to protest. "So is the senior president Irish."

"No, the vice-president." There was a wide distinction between the two
offices. "Besides"--this was a wider distinction--"Murph lives at the
Falls."

Living at the Falls, the little settlement at the head of the river, and
lunching at noon, in the empty schoolhouse, out of tin boxes, with a
forlorn assembly of half a dozen or so, was a handicap that few could
live down.

"Murph?"

"The team calls him Murphy. I don't know why. They're crazy about him.
He lives a half mile north of the Falls. Walking five miles a day to
learn Latin! He's a fool and a roughneck, but he can play ball.
Yesterday on Brown's field----"

Willard started happily upon technicalities of football formations.
Judith stopped listening. He could talk on unaided, pausing only for an
occasional yes or no.

Brown's field! It was a tree-fringed stretch of level grass set high at
the edge of the woods, on the other side of the river, with glimpses of
the river showing through the trees far below. Here, on long autumn
afternoons, sparkling and cool, but golden at the heart, ending
gloriously in red, sudden sunsets, football practice went on every day;
shifting here and there, mysteriously, over the field, the arbitrary
evolutions that were football, the shuffling, and shouting, and panting
silence; on rugs and sweaters under the trees, an audience of girls,
shivering delightfully, or holding some hero's sweater, too proud to be
cold.

Judith had seen all this through Willard's eyes, or from a passing
carriage, but now she would go herself, go perhaps every day. Her mother
would let her. She would not understand, but she would let her, just as
she had to-night. Judith could be part of the close-knit life of the
school in the last two years there--the years that counted. The party
was a test and her mother had met it favourably. That was why she was
glad to go, as nearly as she understood. She did not know quite what she
wanted of the party, only how very much she wanted to go.

Willard was ask