But that was evidently not the intention. For, after hesitating a few seconds over the table, the white-clad figure turned and went out of the door into the hall.
“Well, what do you make of that?” Tom asked himself. “He has got ’em bad! Sneaking out to some other room to write his slushy poetry. He’s the limit! Wait until we get at him in the daylight—there won’t be any loony-moon then. But I should think he’d want to put on a bath robe. It isn’t the warmest night of Summer,” added Tom to himself, being aware of a distinctly chilly feeling about his legs.
“Wait!” he counseled with himself. “I’ll find out about this. I’ll just follow him and give him a scare. I’ll catch him with the goods.”
Pausing to make sure that none of the others were awake, and waiting to give Sid a chance to get a little way down the corridor, Tom slipped out of the door, his feet encased in a pair of bath slippers, that lent themselves better to soft movement than not, for they avoided the scuffling that always goes with bare soles.
Tom reached the corridor, and, looking down it, saw at the farther end the white-robed figure.
“He made good time all right,” Tom mused. “Where can he be going to though, in that rig? Oh, probably to the reading room,” and Tom recalled the large room at the end of the hall, a sort of library fitted up for the use of the dwellers of the dormitory—a room seldom used by the way, for the lads preferred the seclusion of their own apartments.
“Maybe he’s looking for a rhyming dictionary,” thought Tom. “That’s it. I’m on to his game now.”
Tom thought he understood it all. Sid, who used to care nothing for the girls—indeed having a veritable aversion for them—had, of late, been quite different, as Tom and all the others saw and knew. There was one in particular—and it would not be fair for me to mention her name—one in particular about whom Sid, if he did not talk, thought much.
“And he’s going to finish out some poem he began, and got stuck with,” decided Tom. “Probably he knows we’d rig him if we saw him writing that Valentine stuff.
“A rhyming dictionary though. I don’t see what he needs of that. Love, dove, above—you true—eyes of blue. Heart—part—die, sigh—moon—soon—spoon—no, not that. But hair—fair—ever there—thine—mine—valentine. There you are, done without the aid of a net, and with nothing concealed up my sleeve,” mused Tom, shivering slightly as a chilling breeze from the corridor not only crept up his arm, but over other parts of his anatomy.