Next came the parting, when Dick packed up his belongings and moved them over to the big frat house opposite the campus portal on the other street. This was a sort of sorry business, as it was naturally bound to be, but of the two, Larry carried off his part of it rather better than Dick did. “Have you made up your mind yet what you’re going to do?” Dick asked, as he was jamming the last of his things into his trunk and sitting on the lid to make the hasps catch. “About the room, you mean? Mrs. Grant says I can keep it alone, but I know she can’t afford that.” “I feel like a yellow dog, dropping out on her this way when it’s too late in the year for her to make other arrangements,” Dick said, getting up to stand on the trunk lid. “It’s all right with her――that part of it,” Larry offered, “though, of course, she’s sorry to lose you.” “Not half as sorry as I am to go.” Larry let out a cheerful bray and called it a laugh. “Can’t eat your cake and have it too, can you? But I guess you needn’t worry about Mrs. Grant. I expect she’s used to having the frats swipe her star boarders, long before this.” There was the sputtering chuckle of a motor truck in the street below, a clumping of heavy boots in the hall, and then the voice of Mrs. Grant telling the expressman which room to go to. Dick knelt before his trunk to lock it――which gave him a chance to turn his back upon his room-mate. “I didn’t mean Mrs. Grant, altogether,” he mumbled; then, twisting about suddenly, with the queerest look on his face that Larry had ever seen there: “You mustn’t drop me, Larry――just because I’m going into the Omegs. I-I don’t believe I could stand for anything like that.” It was just here, with the expressman tramping along the upper hall and looking for the door to which he had been directed, that the warm Irish Donovan blood came to the fore. “Don’t you lose a minute’s sleep about that, Dickus!” he burst out, dropping into the use of the old school-boy nickname. “They say that blood’s thicker than water, but there are some other things just about as thick as blood. We’ve knocked around together too long to let a little thing like a frat dig a ditch between us now. When you need me I’ll be right there with both feet. Don’t you forget that.” V THE RED-WAGON SCHOLARSHIP Larry’s parting word to Dick had been altogether hearty and cheerful, as we have seen; but after the parting had settled down into a fact accomplished, Larry spent some pretty lonesome evenings. Not because there wasn’t company enough; there is always plenty of that in any college boarding-house, to say nothing――in Larry’s case――of the lame dogs that came straggling in to get a boost over the mathematical hill. But an evening roomful of more or less hilarious and racketing fellows isn’t everything; and after the crowd broke up there was always the empty chair on the opposite side of the study table, and Dick’s bed, made up and never slept in, to remind Larry of his loss.