ght," she said. "That relieves me and makes me happier
than I was just now, for of course if you're my friend you wouldn't let
me make any mistake about you. I believe you, and now, just before I go
in and we won't see much of each other for a week--if you still want me
to go with you again next Sunday--"

"Yes--won't you, please?"

"Yes, if you like. But I want to tell you now that I count on you in all
this, even though you don't 'talk much,' as you say; I count on you
more than I do on anybody else, and I trust you when you say you're my
friend, and it makes me happy. And I think perhaps you're right about
Fred Mitchell. Talk isn't everything, nobody knows that better than
I, who talk so much! and I think that, instead of talking to Fred, a
steady, quiet influence like yours would do more good than any amount of
arguing. So I trust you, you see? And I'm sorry I had that queer doubt
of you." She held out her hand. "Unless I happen to see you on the
campus for a minute, in the meantime, it's good-bye until a week from
to-day. So--well, so, good-bye until then!"

"Wait," said Ramsey.

"What is it?"

He made a great struggle. "I'm not influencing Fred not to go," he said.
"I--don't want you to trust me to do anything like that."

"What?"

"I think it's all right for him to go, if he wants to," Ramsey said,
miserably.

"You do? For him to go to _fight?_"

He swallowed. "Yes."

"_Oh!_" she cried, turned even redder than he, and ran up the stone
steps. But before the storm doors closed upon her she looked down to
where he stood, with his eyes still lowered, a lonely-seeming figure,
upon the pavement below. Her voice caught upon a sob as she spoke.

"If you feel like that, you might as well go and enlist, yourself," she
said, bitterly. "I can't--I couldn't--speak to you again after this!"

Chapter XIX

It was easy enough for him to evade Fred Mitchell's rallyings these
days; the sprig's mood was truculent, not toward his roommate but toward
Congress, which was less in fiery haste than he to be definitely at war
with Germany. All through the university the change had come: athletics,
in other years spotlighted at the centre of the stage, languished
suddenly, threatened with abandonment; students working for senior
honours forgot them; everything was forgotten except that growing
thunder in the soil. Several weeks elapsed after Dora's bitter dismissal
of Ramsey before she was mentioned between the comr