"Hallo!" the Colonel exclaimed, standing still, and looking at me.
"Well?" I said, perhaps rather testily. "What is the matter?"
"You are not on very good terms with young Farquhar, then?"
"I am not on any terms at all with him," I answered grumpily.
The Colonel whistled. "Indeed!" he said, looking down at me with a kind of wistfulness in his eyes; Dick is tall, and I am--well, I was up to standard once. "I thought--that is, Jim told me--that he was a good deal about your house, Joe. And I rather gathered that he was making up to Kitty, don't you know."
"You did, did you?" I grunted. "Well, perhaps he was, and perhaps he wasn't. Any way, she is not for him. And he would not take an answer, the young whipper-snapper!" I continued, giving my anger a little vent, and feeling all the better for it. "He came persecuting her, if you want to know. And I had to show him the door."
I think I never saw a man--certainly on the steps of the "Junior United"--look more pleased than the Colonel looked at that moment. "Gad!" he said, "Then Jim will have a chance?"
"Ho! ho!" I answered, chuckling. "The wind sets in that quarter, does it? A chance? I should think he would have a chance, Colonel!"
"And you would not object?"
"Object?" I said. "Why, it would make me the happiest man in the world, Dick. Are we not the oldest friends? And I have only Kitty and you have only Jim. Why, it is--it is just Inkerman over again!"