Toby laughed too then and struggled into the second glove and smote them together and viewed them proudly, and Mr. Loring and Beech smiled understandingly at each other. After that, although Toby thought that he had utterly failed to meet the situation, the interrupted practice went on. To the amusement of the others, those new gloves quite upset Toby’s game and for a few minutes Beech scored goals almost as he liked. But that didn’t last and very soon the old struggle for mastery was on again in earnest and Mr. Loring, who had an engagement in the village at twelve and should have been on his way even then, enjoyed the contest so much that he stayed until Beech called a halt. Then he hurried off by the river path with the tails of his fur coat flapping ludicrously in the wind. Toby and Beech, treading the squeaky board-walk that led up the slope to the gymnasium, watched and chuckled. At least, Beech chuckled. Toby didn’t because nothing that Alfred Loring could do after that morning could ever seem ludicrous to him. He wondered if the coach had guessed that the reason he had no better gloves was because he hadn’t the money to buy them with, and concluded he had――and decided that he didn’t care. Mr. Loring was much too fine a gentleman to look down on a chap because he happened to be poor. Those gloves were not left in his locker in the gymnasium that day, but accompanied him into class room and commons, to be secretly felt of at intervals. By that time Toby’s exchequer was slightly replenished and he decided that those gloves demanded a pair of leg-guards to go with them. He could buy the leg-guards if he used all his money except a few pennies and he determined to be reckless and get them. Not having Arnold to call on for advice and counsel, he sacrificed most of his dinner the next day, and hurried off to the village alone. As it turned out, Arnold’s advice wouldn’t have helped him a great deal, for there were but two styles of leg-guards to choose from at Fessenden’s, one cheap and unworthy the honor of being associated with those new gloves and the other expensive and wonderful. Toby unhesitatingly purchased a pair of the latter sort and counted out his money with a fine feeling of affluence. The only fly in his ointment was that he couldn’t put them on then and there and wear them home. Of course he could have done so, too, but he had a suspicion that the residents of Greenburg would stare. But he wore them that afternoon and gloried in the immaculate beauty of the white leather and felt uncomfortably conspicuous until he got interested in stopping the shots at goal and forgot them. They came up well above his knee and down over his ankle-bones, and there were no pesky leather straps punched with holes which were never in the right places. Instead, they were held in place by canvas strips which, once slipped through the clasps, stayed there immovably as long as you wanted them to and undid very easily. In those new white gloves and