“It’s all right with her—that part of it,” Larry offered, “though, of course, she’s sorry to lose you.”
“Not half as sorry as I am to go.”
Larry let out a cheerful bray and called it a laugh.
“Can’t eat your cake and have it too, can you? But I guess you needn’t worry about Mrs. Grant. I expect she’s used to having the frats swipe her star boarders, long before this.”
There was the sputtering chuckle of a motor truck in the street below, a clumping of heavy boots in the hall, and then the voice of Mrs. Grant telling the expressman which room to go to. Dick knelt before his trunk to lock it—which gave him a chance to turn his back upon his room-mate.
“I didn’t mean Mrs. Grant, altogether,” he mumbled; then, twisting about suddenly, with the queerest look on his face that Larry had ever seen there: “You mustn’t drop me, Larry—just because I’m going into the Omegs. I-I don’t believe I could stand for anything like that.”
It was just here, with the expressman tramping along the upper hall and looking for the door to which he had been directed, that the warm Irish Donovan blood came to the fore.
“Don’t you lose a minute’s sleep about that, Dickus!” he burst out, dropping into the use of the old school-boy nickname. “They say that blood’s thicker than water, but there are some other things just about as thick as blood. We’ve knocked around together too long to let a little thing like a frat dig a ditch between us now. When you need me I’ll be right there with both feet. Don’t you forget that.”