"Stop!" The voice seemed to be calm now. "While it may be true that you did not break into my room with intent to rob or injure a defenceless woman, yet, by your own confession, you came to torment a weaker person. You wanted to haze one of the freshmen in this house; that was it. And when my husband——"
"Oh, have mercy on me. Won't you have mercy?" Then he began to tell her what a good boy he had always been, and how he had always gone to church, and how fond his mother was of him, and that he was the pride and ambition of the family, and similar rot, showing how completely scared to death he was. "Just think what this means to me," he concluded. "If I'm fired from college, I'll never come back. I'll be disgraced for life. All my prospects will be blighted, my life ruined, and my mother's heart broken."
She gave a little hysterical sob, as if the strain were too great for her. "Yes, for your poor mother's sake; yes, go!" she exclaimed.
"Oh, thank you with all my heart. My mother would, too, if she could know. I don't deserve to be treated so well. I shall always think of you as my merciful benefactress. I can never forgive myself for causing you pain. Oh, thank you."
Buckley, the sophomore, who had strode into that room so manfully, in the full pride of his sophomorish strength and orange and black, grovelled across the room and out of the door, then tip-toed his way down the hall stairs, silently pulled back the latch of the front door, and sneaked off, with his tail between his legs.
The outside air did him good, and by the time he reached his impatient class-mates he had thought up a fairly good lie about the freshman's being ill, quite seriously ill, and about his stopping to look after him a bit, which they admitted was the only thing to do under the circumstances, though it was blamed hard lines, after all the trouble they had taken. "Better luck next time, Buck," they said, and went to bed.
By the ten o'clock mail next morning Buckley received a letter in strange handwriting. It said: "Just as a tall woman looks short in a man's make-up, so does a short man look tall in a woman's make-up, and you should know that blondes are hard to recognize in brunette wigs. I could have done more artistic acting if you had come up earlier, when I had on my full costume. You ought to know that a real girl wouldn't have behaved quite that way. You see you still have a number of things to learn, even though you are a soph. Sort of hard luck, all this, isn't it, old man? Hoping that the rouge will wash off your lips and that you will learn to forgive yourself, I am your merciful benefactress, H. G. Valliant."
This is the freshest thing I ever heard of.
There was a P. S. which said: "Whether or not this thing gets out rests entirely with you and your hazing friends."
Of course it did get out, as all such things do; but Valliant was not bothered again by sophomores, though he ought to have been hazed up and down and inside-out and cross-wise by the whole college.