Hildebrand caught his breath suddenly and his face turned scarlet. Stopping abruptly, he turned fiercely on Hollister, with blazing eyes and clenched fists. Another moment and he would have landed a smashing blow on the face of the man who had called him a liar, but, just in time, he got a grip on himself and realized the utter impossibility of two seniors indulging in a fist fight in the street. “You’ll be sorry for that, Hollister!” he said, in a voice which quivered with suppressed anger. “I might have known that this would be all the thanks I’d get for trying to do you a good turn. I’ll send you written proof of the statement I just made. Luckily there were two other men in the game.” Without another word, he walked quickly away, leaving Hollister alone, a feeling of regret that he had been so hasty, struggling with the anger which Hildebrand’s accusation against his friend had aroused in him. “I suppose I shouldn’t have said that,” he murmured regretfully. “But he made me mad with those rotten insinuations against Jarv.” Then the thought came to him that Hildebrand had not contented himself with insinuations. He had made a downright, matter-of-fact statement, which he proposed to back with written proof. But even then Bob could not bring himself to believe that Blake would descend so low as to cheat at cards. There must have been a mistake made somewhere—must be some explanation of the thing. Blake was one of his special friends whom he had known and liked ever since they first entered college together, and in all that time he had never known Jarvis to do anything which was not quite square and honorable. Hollister was not at all a good judge of character. His likes and dislikes were very strong, but they were governed by his heart and not by his head. If he once came to care for a fellow he was ready to stick to him through thick and thin, stand up for him at all times and places, and refused to listen to a word against him. Once or twice during his college life he had been disappointed in a man who had been admitted to the inner circle of his friendship. One notable instance was that of a perfectly charming fellow who was possessed of almost every known accomplishment and talent, but in whom the sense of right and wrong was strangely, inexplicably lacking. Hollister had taken to him tremendously from the very first, and the fellow’s charm of manner and personal magnetism had blinded him to a realizing sense of his sinister failings. For months Bob stuck to him, refusing to listen to the advice of other friends who had discovered the man’s real character, and had only been brought to his senses by coming in suddenly one day and catching the fellow in the act of taking money out of the bill case he had left carelessly on the table.