Helen looked a dignified reproof of his unmannerly enthusiasm, but Jimmie's youth was proof against any such mild rebuke, and her irritation only kindled his joy. She nodded to Hayward for more speed, but as Jimmie was favoured by a stiff breeze they could not shake him off. He followed them for two miles or more up the lake, volunteering much information sandwiched between cheers for Eli, which, when he had delivered it fully and in detail, he began to repeat in order to impress it upon them. Hayward cheerfully would have bumped him with the launch.
Having so thoroughly enjoyed the morning's sport, Captain Jimmie regularly afterward flew the blue pennant from his mast, and was ever on the alert to greet Helen with the Yale yell and further particulars.
* * * * *
Less than a month later the Harvard crew rowed rings around the Yale men at New London. Helen's cup was full. The next day she and Nell Stewart and Nancy Chester were sitting out on the lawn reading an account of the race when they saw Jimmie's catboat beating about the lake.
"Come, girls," exclaimed Helen, "we must carry the news to Jimmie!"
"Hayward, come here," she called to the footman, who was tinkering at a gasoline runabout a hundred yards from them. "Get the launch ready," she added when he came nearer, "we want to overtake Mr. Radwine's boat out there."
"I guess Jimmie will haul down that blue flag now," said one of the girls when they had come to the boat-house.
"Hayward," said Helen, "run up to the house and tell mamma to give you the Harvard pennant that is in my room—and hurry!"
Hayward needed no urging. Out of the chatter he had caught the news of Harvard's victory at the oars, and he was as full of excited pleasure as Helen herself. He hurried up the hill and, not finding Mrs. Phillips, rushed to his own quarters and turned out from his trunk the crimson pennant.
Helen was too intent on the chase of Jimmie Radwine to notice that the short staff of the flag Hayward brought her, and the faded and wrinkled folds of the cloth, did not belong to the crimson emblem which was part of the decoration of her dressing-table. Jimmie, already informed of Yale's bitter defeat, surmised the purpose of the Phillips launch's coming, and tried to sail away and away: but he was relentlessly pursued and overtaken, and mercilessly repaid for all of his taunts of the last fortnight. As they came up with him Helen cried out to her friends: