This late talk with Carroll did more toward putting Tony at his ease in the school than perhaps anything that happened to him. From that time on he became very friendly with his room-mate—all the better friends doubtless because they always maintained toward each other a certain reserve, due rather to Carroll’s involuntary elaborateness of manner than to any deliberate effort on their part. All the better also was it that real as was their mutual regard for each other neither had that enthusiastic affection that school boys so frequently experience, and of which Tony was already aware in another direction. For just such a friendship quickly developed between him and Jimmie Lawrence. He has missed one of the purest joys of life who has not known the delights of an enthusiastic boyish friendship. It has its sweetnesses, its fears and scruples, as has every other love; but there is a cloudless carelessness about its happy days as about no other period of life. For Tony, in that first Indian summer at Deal to wander off from the common fields with Jimmie Lawrence, into unfamiliar haunts, into the enchanted region of Lovel’s Woods, or along the rocky kelp-strewn shores of the Strathsey River or the tawny beaches of the Neck, was a joy pure and unalloyed. Among others Carroll watched the development of this friendship with interest. Carroll was not the sort to give his affection quickly in such whole-hearted fashion, though he cared deeply enough about things, he thought. He neither approved nor disapproved of his room-mate’s devotion to Jimmie, certainly was not jealous of it. If such things must be—he had a way of smiling with his assumed air of cynicism when friendship was mentioned—why he supposed Jimmie Lawrence was as worthy of Tony’s devotion as the next boy. Carroll never spoke of this friendship to Tony, but tactfully began to welcome Jimmie as a visitor to their rooms during that fall term. To his own form-mates he referred to his study as “the kindergarten.” He did, however, speak unusually frankly to Tony of another friendship which that youth appeared to have made. They had wandered toward the beach one evening. Football practice was just over; Tony had had his bath and was glowing a beautiful pink and white in the soft air of the Indian summer twilight. “Do you know,” said Carroll, flecking at the pebbles in the sands, as they stopped at the creek, “that you have made a great hit with our beloved Bill?” Tony laughed. “Bill’s made a great hit with me, I may say. But doubtless that’s plain enough.”