Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction; Hockey -- Juvenile fiction; Teenage boys -- Juvenile fiction
Toby, listening whether he wanted to or not, wished Stillwell would
be quiet. How could a fellow study with such an uproar going on?
Presently Stillwell was quiet, and then Toby sort of wished he would
sing again. The silence was horribly lonesome. He raised his eyes from
the book at last and viewed disconsolately the shabby little room.
He wished himself back at home and, for the time at least, honestly
regretted ever having come to Yardley. It had been, he assured himself,
a silly thing to do. Most of the fellows weren’t his sort. Nearly
all that he knew――and he knew few enough――were boys with well-to-do
parents, boys who had about everything they wanted, who lived in
comfortable rooms with pictures on the walls and rugs on the floors
and easy-chairs to loll in and all sorts of nice things. Secretly,
of course, if not openly――and he had to acknowledge grudgingly that
they didn’t do it openly――they looked down on him for being poor and
ill-dressed and having to press clothes to make enough money to assure
his return another year. They weren’t his kind at all. It would have
been far better had he kept on at the high school in Johnstown, as he
would have done if Arnold hadn’t beguiled him with glowing accounts of
Yardley. And there was the matter of the scholarship, too. Toby had
rather hoped to secure one of the six Fourth Year scholarships, if not
a Ripley, which credited one with sixty dollars against the tuition
fee, then a Haynes, which carried fifty dollars with it. Arnold had
been quite sure that Toby could do it and Toby had thought so himself
just at first, but there had been trouble with mathematics in October
and during the time that he had striven to make good as a football
player he had slumped a little in Latin as well. The announcement would
be made the last of the week, but Toby no longer dared hope to hear his
name coupled with one of the prizes.
Suddenly he turned his gaze toward the door and listened intently.
Footsteps on the stairs! They sounded like Arnold’s! Then they came
along the corridor, nearer and nearer. Were they Arnold’s? One instant
Toby thought they were and the next doubted it. They weren’t quite
like, but if they stopped at his door――
They did stop! And a knock sounded! Toby held his breath. He wanted to
run across the room and throw the door open, but something held him
motionless. Another knock, louder this time, and then the door-knob was
tried.
“Let him knock,” said Toby to himself stubbornly. But he didn’t really
mean it. If Arnold called, he decided, he would let him in. He waited
tensely. There was a moment’s silence outside. Arnold must know that he
was in, Toby assured himself, for he could see the light through the
transom and if he really cared about seeing him he would try again. If
he didn’t――
“Tucker!” called a voice from beyond the locked door. “Tucker, are you
in there?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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