“Run over to the Charles River Bank, and ask them in just what metropolis of the United States or Europe, William is signing cheques at the present moment.”
When John returned, breathless, a few minutes later, he threw himself into a chair, and groaned,—
“They’re in Providence.”
Haydock gave up a dinner at his club that night, and a dance in town. He went, instead, to Providence. Late the next evening he deposited Billy—too much of a wreck to be either resentful or flippant—in 86 Matthews. The next day the Office put Billy “on probation.”
And the midyears were coming.
One night, after the examination period was well under way, Haydock went up to his room to study. Although the month was February, the night was heavy and depressing. The senior had much to accomplish before morning. He was nervous—almost irritable. His curtains floated like ghostly, beckoning sleeves in and out of the open windows, until he jumped up and tied them viciously into hard knots. His student lamp radiated the heat of hell and the unnumbered suns; he found himself waiting, in nervous suspense, for the periodic bubbling of its rudimentary bowels. The sound diverted his attention from his book, and wasted the limited time left him in which to commit to memory several hundred lines of Paradise Lost. The verse,—
“And, sweet reluctant amourous delay,”
—he came across it in the feverish scramble of learning five lines a minute by the watch,—suddenly put the situation in a light in which he had not until then been able to see it. He leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud. And as he laughed, he heard a light footstep in the hall, then a knock on his door.
“I heard you laughing and knew you couldn’t be working, so I just knocked,” said Dilford Bancroft, innocently ignoring the very unusual fact that Haydock had on neither coat nor waistcoat, that a shaded student lamp was the only light in the room, and that several open books and some scattered notes lay on the table. “What’s the joke?” he asked. Then without waiting for an answer, “Hasn’t Billy come yet?”
“Is Billy coming?” said Haydock, with an interest that sprang solely from alarm.