Milly laughed.
“No laughing matter, I tell you. I’ve broken training. I haven’t been to the oval, or on the river, or riding in the park but once since the games. Instead of that, I put myself in the hands of our Professor of Mathematics, and I am letting him give me a private overhauling. His motto is, ‘Find out what the boys don’t like and give them lots of it.’”
“How horrid!” Milly murmured sympathetically.
“He’s just right. If you want to put it in a little kinder way, you might say, ‘Find out where the boys are weak, and then make them strong.’ The trouble is I’m weak all through, so I’m having a rather serious time just now. I shall have to sit up till one o’clock to pay for the pleasure of this interview. The examinations take place between the 25th and 27th of June, inclusive. If I go into this tournament, or even think of it before then, I lose every ghost of a chance for Harvard, and will have to take to the sea, and I loathe it. But that’s nothing—if you want me to do it. You don’t half know me, Milly. I tell you, it’s nothing at all—why I’d give up life itself for you. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give up for your sake. No, you shan’t run away. We’ve got to have it out some time, and we might as well understand one another now. I love you, Milly; I have always loved you; and if you don’t like me—why, I have no use for Harvard, or life either.”
He looked so despairing and yet so wildly eager, that Milly was very sorry for him.
“Of course, I like you, Stacey,” she said kindly.
“You do?” he cried. “I can’t believe it. You are fooling me.”
“No, Stacey; but you are fooling yourself. You would be very sorry, by and bye, if I took you at your word now, and snapped you up before you had time to know your own mind. Why, Stacey, we are both of us too young to know whether we are in earnest. We ought to wait, and we ought neither of us to be bound in any way. Perhaps everything will seem very different to us four years from now. Don’t you think so yourself?”
“I can never change,” Stacey asserted confidently.
“But I may,” Milly said with a smile, thinking of her own foolish little heart, and of how appropriate the advice she was giving to Stacey was to her own case.