“Oh, I’m no good at it. I’ve never played very much. Here, start in now.”
“You ought to make a good end or back, with your speed. Why don’t you come out and try?”
“Why don’t you settle down to your job? We’re not here to talk football.”
As a matter of fact, it was David rather than Wallace whose thoughts went straying after that conversation. In view of the episode of the spiked shoes, how was he to tell Wallace that he could not come out for football simply because he had no clothes? Wallace would probably at once play the fairy godmother again and furnish him with an outfit. David was eager to play; he had gained in weight and strength in this last year; there was nothing he would like better than to test his ability and skill, nothing that he hated worse than to be thought soft and timorous. And that, of course, was what most fellows would think.
But his mother’s letters stiffened his self-denial. She wrote that his father seemed preoccupied and worried, and that patients were not paying their bills, and that, though she knew it was selfish, she could not help wishing every minute that David were at home. So he said to himself that he did not care what people thought; he was not going to cost the family a penny more than was absolutely necessary.
Three days after the track meet he was invited to the rectory for supper.
“You’ll get awfully good food,” said Wallace enviously. “I was there at a blow-out last week.”
The rectory was a hospitable house, and on this occasion there were eight other guests besides David, all fifth-formers, who sat down to supper with the family. The food justified Wallace’s prediction; David blushed under congratulations from both Dr. and Mrs. Davenport, and still more under Ruth’s statement from across the table—“It was a corking race.” After supper the rector walked with him out of the dining-room and said a pleasant word, complimenting him on the assistance he was giving to Wallace.
Then they all sat in the library while Dr. Davenport read them a story from Kipling, after which he excused himself and, departing to his study, left the further entertainment of the guests to his wife and daughter. With charades and “Consequences” and “Up Jenkins,” they beguiled the time hilariously. David, when it was possible, followed Ruth with his eyes; she was so nimble, so joyous, so radiant, that she quite fascinated him; in watching her and in waiting for her voice he sometimes lost the thread of the action and bungled the part that he had to play. But he did not mind, for her laughter seemed to him even kinder and sweeter than her applause.
The guests prepared to take their departure; in schoolboy habit they formed in line to shake hands with their hostesses and say good-night. David happened to be the last in the line, and Ruth detained him a moment while she said: