t up and pressed my face against
the glass, knowing that she was probably sitting up and waiting.

Yes, she was there--behind the counter with her shawl still over her
head and her eyes fixed on the cheap wall clock. She could not see me in
the darkness outside--not even when she turned her head and gave me a
full view of her face, so that I could see how strangely pale and set it
was, and how deeply lurking in her eyes was the fear of the moment.

I did not go in and tell her anything. I could not. The sight of her and
the appeal of her thin, tragic little body sent me hurrying back with my
errand uncompleted--and glad, madly glad that it was so.

I crept up to bed as soon as I was "in bounds" again. I wanted to avoid
Sydney. Nor would I give him a chance to speak to me the next morning. I
felt that I knew now, almost in its entirety, the scheme he was
laying--and the climax which was fast approaching. And, after having
seen her, as I did last night, I knew that I could never go walking with
him again or have more to do with him, and that I must go back to her,
some day soon, traitor-wise, and warn her against him who had been my
best friend.

In the afternoon, after school was done, a crowd of us obtained
permission to go swimming in a nearby lake. Sydney was among us: the
leader of us, in fact. He tried to speak to me--perhaps he was going to
apologize to me for having called me a Jew--I do not know. But, though I
did not give him the chance, I remember well how tall and brave he
looked, and how his hair waved back from his forehead like Steerforth's.

And like Steerforth, too, he was drowned.

Schoolboys are careless of their swimming. We did not notice until it
was long too late that Sydney had disappeared. When his body was
recovered, the doctors worked over it for fully two hours. But it was no
use.

* * * * *

His funeral was held in the school parlor the next morning. But it had
been a night of terrors, of whispering groups, of Death's shadow over us
all--and we were but children. His empty bed, his dress uniform tossed
carelessly over the back of a chair, the knowledge of his insensible
presence in the undertaker's shop at the other end of town ... brought
fear and wakefulness to us all.

And as for me, I sat all night at the dormitory window and listening to
the creak and groan of the old Revolutionary oak in the quadrangle,
thought of many things: of the walks we had