The others crossed to London the day before the great event. Billy Benson met them joyously at the station.
“Sold my Bond Street clothes,” he announced, “for just what they cost me, to a nice little chap on the Harvard subs. Told him he’d need ’em for the celebrations after the race. Didn’t tell him that I was down to my last little express check. How are you people going to see the race?”
John explained, and Billy chuckled. “Bet I’ve seen your father. He was down at the American Express Offices this morning trying to buy up the boat they’ve advertised as especially for American spectators. Said he’d pay whatever they liked if they’d refund the money on the tickets they’d already sold and let him have the whole thing for his party. But they wouldn’t do it—couldn’t, of course. He was in an awful rage.”
John and the girls laughed at the description, and Mrs. Hildreth despatched John in haste to his father’s hotel to explain that such magnificent accommodations were quite unnecessary. Jasper J. Morton was still peppery over his defeat.
“Boats are all partly sold; desirable anchorages all taken. Nothing to do but scramble aboard with the rest of the crowd. Maybe the girls don’t mind it; I do. When I ask ladies to go to a boat-race, I want to do the thing up properly.”
John decided that the time was not propitious for making his announcement, but led up to it gently by suggesting that dinner at one of the big hotels on the Embankment would be a luxurious enough ending to the afternoon’s pleasures to make the girls forget any slight discomfort they had experienced earlier in the day.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Mr. Morton admitted grudgingly. “Something in the nature of a celebration of Harvard’s victory, I suppose you mean. The London papers don’t seem to think we’ll win, but of course they’re prejudiced. I hope those Harvard fellows haven’t come all this distance just to show the English that Americans can’t row, eh?”
“Benson thinks they have a chance,” John said, and repeated Billy’s lively account of the crew’s practice records. “But if we don’t win,” he added tentatively, “we can celebrate something else.”
Jasper J. Morton sniffed scornfully. “The Harvard spirit and a good race and all that? No sir, a defeat is a defeat. If we lose, there’ll be nothing whatever to celebrate. Don’t let me hear you talking any nonsense of that sort. A man who means to succeed in business mustn’t get himself muddled about success and failure. Be a good loser if you have to; but don’t you ever boast about it, or celebrate it.”
So John’s mild effort to introduce the subject of his engagement proved futile, and he decided to wait till morning. But morning found Mr. Morton spinning out to Windsor in his car, because some one at his hotel had told him that it would be madness to go back to America without seeing the finest royal residence in England.