Silence for a little while, and then Purdick began again. “I’ve been leaning hard upon what you said to me—that freezing cold night in my old room over Heffelfinger’s: that you’d have taken the money yourself if you’d been in my place. Can you say it again, Larry?”
“Easier now than I could then. The fellow who built your scholarship is a man, all the way up and down, Purdy. I’d bank on him for anything.”
“It wasn’t Dick Maxwell?”
Larry laughed. “No, it wasn’t Dickie. But you mustn’t begin to worm things out of me by the process of elimination. Let’s be fair to your ‘good angel.’ All he asks is to stay unknown. Besides, I shouldn’t wonder if he’d forgotten all about the scholarship by this time. It’d be just like him.”
Purdick looked up quickly.
“Do you mean by that he’s got so much money that two thousand dollars, more or less, don’t mean anything to him?” he asked.
Larry had a swift jab from that inner sense which is sometimes called after-wit, realizing that he had said too much.
“You shut up, Purdy; I’m not going to say another word about it. You’ve got the boost, and the other fellow’s got what does him a lot more good than the money is doing you. That’s all there is to it, and you couldn’t get any more out of me if you were to give me the third degree.”
That settled it for the time being, and during the few remaining days which led up to Commencement Week everybody was too busy to think or talk about anything but the year-end job in hand.
It was after the examinations were over, and there was not much left for a Freshman to do but to burn his green cap and go home, that Larry and little Purdick took a farewell evening hike out to the bridge which bore their class numerals. It had been a perfect June day, and the evening matched it harmoniously. A light shower the night before had laid the dust, spring green was waving from the trees and nodding to them from the fields, and the song of the cardinal was abroad in the land.