man most of all! And I like to think that if everybody in
college had denounced you, you'd have gone straight on. And--you
WOULD!"

Within a week after this they were calling each the other by
their first names.


For the Christmas holidays she went with her mother from Battle
Field direct to Chicago, to her father's sisters Mrs.
Hayden--Colonel Gardiner had been called south on business. When
she came back she and Scarborough took up their friendship where
they had left it. They read the same books, had similar tastes,
disagreed sympathetically, agreed with enthusiasm. She saw a
great deal of several other men in her class, enough not to make
her preference for him significant to the college--or to herself.
They went for moonlight straw-rides, on moonlight and starlight
skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks over the hills--all
invariably with others, but they were often practically alone.
He rapidly dropped his rural manners and mannerisms--Fred
Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical of the
surface changes in him.

Late in February his cousin, the superintendent of the farm,
telegraphed him to come home. He found his mother ill--plainly
dying. And his father--Bladen Scarborough's boast had been that
he never took a "dose of drugs" in his life, and for at least
seventy of his seventy-nine years he had been "on the jump"
daily from long before dawn until long after sundown. Now he was
content to sit in his arm-chair and, with no more vigorous