“Oh, yes—he’ll be here,” answered Dilly, reassuring any foolish doubts on that question. He had opened the piano and was striking careful discords in the bass, “I was sure you were talking to him when I came in; he said he’d bring round his system.”
“His what?”
“Why, his system—the ‘Rhyming Road,’ he calls it. You’re going to give us a seminar, you know—the exam comes to-morrow; and he’s going to bring round his notes and the ‘Rhyming Road’ to help out.”
Haydock was hearing of this little arrangement for the first time. He hadn’t seen Billy since the return from Providence.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he began; “I have no end of work myself and—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” broke in Dilly, a trifle impatiently, without turning from the piano; “you see we never thought about it ourselves until this afternoon, when we found out that the exam comes to-morrow. We were sure you’d do it,” he wheeled slowly about until he faced Haydock; “because neither of us know anything, and if you don’t—we’ll fail.”
Haydock met this plaint with the worried silence of one who dimly foresees his own end. Dilly couldn’t have made a more persuasive appeal if he had tried. Its strength lay in the fact that Dilly hadn’t tried; he had simply laid bare, with an apparently childlike trust in Haydock’s wisdom, his own and Billy’s hopeless inconsequence. It was rather late in the day to discuss the matter.
“We were counting on you,” Dilly sighed, and looked at the floor. He ventured this statement in the hope of keeping the subject alive; somehow it had seemed to languish.
“I confess I don’t understand you two,” Haydock burst out. Every one who had the pleasure of knowing Billy and Dilly took refuge in this exclamation at one time or another. “How the devil have you managed to hang on here for four months? And why on earth did you come to college at all?” he shook the boy by the shoulders.
Dilly’s apologia might have been interesting. He had on occasions attempted—by request—to defend the fact of his being at Harvard; but as he had always prefaced his few remarks with, “To begin with, I am of a taciturn disposition,” and as no one was quite willing to believe that he had a glimmer of the meaning of “taciturn,” he had never been allowed to proceed from that point. To-night the appearance of Billy with an armful of note-books made explanation impossible.