But to feast alone was no longer a feast at all. He went to the window and sniffed the warm air, trying to penetrate the outer darkness. Then, balancing carefully, he let himself out and, dropping on the yielding earth, went hungrily up to the campus.
He had never been on the Circle before at night, with all the lights about him. It gave him a strange, breathless feeling. He sat down, hugging his knees, in the center of the Circle, where he could command the blazing windows of the Houses and the long, lighted ranks of the Upper, where the fourth-formers were singing on the Esplanade. The chapel at his back was only a shadow; Memorial Hall, a cloud hung lower than the rest.
From his position of vantage he could hear scraps of conversation through the open windows, and see dark figures flitting before the mellow lamps. The fellowship in the Houses, the good times, the feeling of home that hung about each room came to him with acute poignancy as he sat there, vastly alone. In the whole school he had made not a friend. He had done nothing; no one knew him. No one cared. He had blundered from the first. He saw his errors now—only too plainly—but they were beyond retrieving.
There was only a week more and then it would be over. He would never come back. What was the use? And yet, as he sat there outside the life and lights of it all, he regretted, bitterly regretted, that it must be so. He felt the tug at his heartstrings. It was something to win a place in such a school, to have the others look up to you, to have the youngsters turn and follow you as you passed, as they did with Charlie DeSoto or Flash Condit or Turkey Reiter or a dozen of others. Instead, he would drop out of the ranks, and who would notice it? A few who would make a good story out of that miserable game of baseball. A few who would speak of him as the freshest of the fresh, the fellow who had to be put in Coventry—if, indeed, any one would remember Dink Stover, the fellow who hadn't made good.
The bell clanged out the summons to bed for the Houses. One by one the windows dropped back into the night; only the Upper remained ablaze.
At this moment he heard somewhere in the dark near him the sound of scampering feet. The next moment a small body tripped over his legs and went sprawling.
"What in the name of Willie Keeler!" said a shrill voice. "Is that a master or a human being?"
"Hello!" said Stover gruffly, to put down the lump that had risen in his throat. "Who are you."
"Me? Shall we tell our real names?" said the voice approaching and at once bursting out into an elfish chant:
Wow, wow! Wow, wow, wow!
Oh, me father's name was Finnegan,
Me mother's name was Kate,
Me ninety-nine relations
To you I'll now relate.