al.

When, a few minutes later, he walked off the field, he experienced no
elation. He realized all at once how tired he was. Like a child he
wanted to go to Stringham and say:

"Stringham, I don't want to play any more games to-day. I want to lie
down and rest."

He smiled as he dreamed of Stringham's reply.

It was Stringham, really, who came to him as he sat silently and with
drooping shoulders in the dressing-room.

"What's wrong here? When you're hurt I want to know it."

George got up.

"I'm not hurt. I'm all right."

Green arrived and helped Stringham poke while George submitted, wishing
they'd leave him alone so he could sit down and rest.

"We've got to have him next week," Stringham said, "but this game isn't
won by a long shot."

"What's the matter with me?" George asked. "I'll play."

He heard a man near by remark:

"He's got the colour of a Latin Salutatorian."

They let him go back, nevertheless, and at the start he suffered his
first serious injury. He knew when he made the tackle that the strap of
his headgear snapped. He felt the leather slide from his head,
experienced the crushing of many bodies, had a brief conviction that the
sun had been smothered. His next impression was of bare, white walls in
a shaded room. His brain held no record of the hushing of the multitude
when he had remained stretched in his darkness on the trampled grass; of
the increasing general fear while substitutes had carried him from the
field on a stretcher; or of the desertion of the game by the Baillys, by
Betty and her father, by Wandel, the inscrutable, even by the
revolutionary Allen, by a score of others, who had crowded the entrance
of the dressing room asking hushed questions, and a few moments later
had formed behind him a silent and frightened procession as he had been
carried to the infirmary. Mrs. Bailly told him about it.

"I saw tears in Betty's eyes," she said, softly, "through my own. It was
so like a funeral march."

"And you missed the end of the game?" George asked.

She nodded.

"When my husband knew Harvard had scored he said, 'That wouldn't have
happened if George had been there.' And it wouldn't have."

But all George could think of was:

"Squibs missed half a game for me, and there were tears in Betty's
eyes."

Tears, because he had suggested the dreadful protagonist of a funeral
march.

His period of consciousness was brief. He drifted into the darkness once
more, accompanie