"No, the girls. They won't dance with him. He won't get a decent name on his card. Roughneck, keeping Ed off the team. He's an Irish boy."

"An Irish boy?" Something, vague as an unforgotten dream that comes back at night, though you are too busy to recall it in waking hours, urged Judith to protest. "So is the senior president Irish."

"No, the vice-president." There was a wide distinction between the two offices. "Besides"—this was a wider distinction—"Murph lives at the Falls."

Living at the Falls, the little settlement at the head of the river, and lunching at noon, in the empty schoolhouse, out of tin boxes, with a forlorn assembly of half a dozen or so, was a handicap that few could live down.

"Murph?"

"The team calls him Murphy. I don't know why. They're crazy about him. He lives a half mile north of the Falls. Walking five miles a day to learn Latin! He's a fool and a roughneck, but he can play ball. Yesterday on Brown's field——"

Willard started happily upon technicalities of football formations. Judith stopped listening.[Pg 39] He could talk on unaided, pausing only for an occasional yes or no.

[Pg 39]

Brown's field! It was a tree-fringed stretch of level grass set high at the edge of the woods, on the other side of the river, with glimpses of the river showing through the trees far below. Here, on long autumn afternoons, sparkling and cool, but golden at the heart, ending gloriously in red, sudden sunsets, football practice went on every day; shifting here and there, mysteriously, over the field, the arbitrary evolutions that were football, the shuffling, and shouting, and panting silence; on rugs and sweaters under the trees, an audience of girls, shivering delightfully, or holding some hero's sweater, too proud to be cold.

Judith had seen all this through Willard's eyes, or from a passing carriage, but now she would go herself, go perhaps every day. Her mother would let her. She would not understand, but she would let her, just as she had to-night. Judith could be part of the close-knit life of the school in the last two years there—the years that counted. The party was a test and her mother had met it favourably. That was why she was glad to go, as nearly as she understood. She did not know quite what she wanted of the party, only how very much she wanted to go.[Pg 40]

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