“Why, of course! I keep forgetting that you came this fall. It happened this way. Martin discovered Dickinson,—you’ve heard of Martin, haven’t you, of last year’s senior class?”
Varrell nodded.
“Martin discovered that Dickinson could run, and Curtis and I got him out for the sports in the spring and stood sponsors for him until he had courage enough to stand alone.”
“Won everything last year, didn’t he?” asked Varrell.
“Quarter and two-twenty, hands down,” answered Melvin; “but there’s no surety that he’ll do it again. Besides, no one can say yet what the effect of that ankle will be. The doctor thinks it will be as strong as ever, but I know a sprained ankle is very easy to sprain again. Without Dickinson we shouldn’t have much to brag of.”
Both boys turned to their work. Melvin, in the quiet business-like way with which he had learned to attack his lessons, opened his trigonometry on the desk and in a moment was oblivious to all else but the problem which was first to be solved. Varrell’s stint was of a different kind,—forty lines of “Macbeth” to be committed to memory before twelve o’clock. As this involved much repetition and possible interference with the trigonometry problem, he retired to the bedroom, where he could mutter at his ease.
They possessed two very different personalities. Varrell was tall and slight, his limbs hardly filled out to their proper roundness, with a clear-cut, intelligent face and striking gray eyes that were remarkable, not so much for what they showed of the character behind them, as for the power of sight which they seemed to possess. Ever alert and observant, even when his face was otherwise at rest, the eyes seemed the aggressive part of the boy. Their direct glance was like a ray of concentrated intelligence.
“I like Varrell,” said Tompkins one day, in a burst of confidence, “except when he looks at me hard, and then his eyes cut right through me, and I feel as if he were counting the hairs on the back of my head.”
Melvin was more substantially built. As he sat at the table, the cloth of his coat sleeves drew tight over the splendid deltoid and biceps, and his square, blunt knees showed hardened muscles rounding out beyond the knee-cap. If his face lacked the alertness of look so noticeable in Varrell, it yet had a composure and an air of self-reliance and honesty that rendered it no less attractive.
The learner of Shakespeare was restless. The first five lines were mastered in a chair by the window, the next five on Melvin’s bed, the third on Poole’s bed, and the fourth on a second chair. In the circuit of the room he had learned twenty lines.