Even as he spoke he wondered if his voice could sound natural when he was feeling so utterly contemptible.
“Oh, about athletics in college and just how seriously a fellow should take them, and all that kind of thing. Some of the old arguments you and I have had, Lester, worked up into an essay. It was rather good, too, if I do say it. That’s why it makes me so tired to lose it.”
“I guess it’s not lost,” said Richard. “Somebody must have taken it as a joke and will return it to you before the hour.”
Lester made no comment. He was wishing that he had courage enough to pull the theme out of his pocket, and return it on the spot. He felt that he might have done so if he had not torn up the page bearing David’s name and substituted that incriminating page bearing his own. There was no possibility now of his passing his action off as a joke, and he could not bear the ignominy of confessing to Richard as well as to David.
The twelve-o’clock bell rang. Lester rose. “Going over to class?” he said to David.
“Yes,” David answered, “I’ll stop in my room on the way downstairs on the chance that the merry joker has returned my theme.”
Lester waited on the landing while David made a hurried search.
“Nothing doing,” David said as he emerged and closed the door. “I hate to lose that theme. It was about the best I’ve written in the course.”
They reached the classroom just as the exercises for the hour were about to begin. Lester and David both went to the professor’s desk, which was piled with the themes that the members of the class had deposited there. Lester drew the theme from his pocket and quickly thrust it into the pile. He lingered to hear what David would say.