the windows went out, and a small lady and a tall lady and
a thin old man, all three laughing and talking happily, came down and
drove off in the Briscoe buckboard. The little crowd dispersed quietly;
Lige Willetts plucked to his horse and cantered away to overtake the
buckboard; William Todd took his courage between his teeth, and, the
song ringing in his ears, made a desperate resolve to call upon Miss
Bardlock that evening, in spite of its being a week day, and Caleb
Parker gently and stammeringly asked Cynthia if she would wait till he
shut up the shop, and let him walk home with her and Bud.

Soon the Square was quiet as before, and there was naught but peace
under the big stars of July.

That day the news had come that Harkless, after weeks of alternate
improvement and relapse, hazardously lingering in the borderland of
shadows, had passed the crucial point and was convalescent. His recovery
was assured. But from their first word of him, from the message that he
was found and was alive, none of the people of Carlow had really doubted
it. They are simple country people, and they know that God is good.

CHAPTER XV. NETTLES

Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John
Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and
roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in
a common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes
of athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense
triumphancy; two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing
in no unkindly fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff
brains the night before an examination and to blow away the suffocating
statistics like foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing,
laughing, succeeding together, through the four kindest years of life;
two such brave companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly
tender and caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy,
United States form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows. If
John Harkless had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith
could no more have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him
"old friend" than he could have danced on the slack-wire.

One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly,
and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's
eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom