“Try it!” dared Toby. “I wish you would!” Then, as Arnold only stood motionless with his hand on the door-knob, Toby shrugged his shoulders and walked past him. On the threshold he paused for a final fling. “I’m glad to go,” he said hotly. “I don’t care to stay where I’m not wanted. But if you wait for me to apologize you’ll wait until your hair’s gray, Arnold Deering. And, considering the way you love him and stand up for him, I think the least Lamson can do is to divvy up with you on that money he stole. Or perhaps he has already?” The door, with Arnold’s weight against it, thrust Toby into the corridor and closed with a crash. Toby laughed ironically and, his head high and a disk of red in each cheek, climbed the stairs to the hall above. In his room, he moved about for several minutes, picking things up and laying them down again quite unconsciously. He whistled a gay little tune until he suddenly found himself seated in a chair with his hands in his trousers pockets, his legs sprawled out before him and a horrible sinking feeling inside him. The whistle had stopped and he was staring miserably at the tops of the bare trees outside the window. He was sorry. Being sorry is a most absorbing occupation. A fellow can spend heaps of time being sorry and never realize it. And that’s just what Toby did. How long he sat there, sprawled disconsolately in the chair, alternately blaming himself for what had happened and then Arnold, hating Frank with a new and perfectly soul-filling hatred, I don’t know. But I do know that when a sense of the passage of time edged in past the varied and warring emotions and he looked at the tin clock on the bureau it was exactly eight minutes to nine and he had missed chapel! To miss chapel without a good and sufficient excuse was a bad piece of business for a scholarship student, and the fact drove all thought of Frank and Arnold and the quarrel from his mind. There was a bare chance, one chance in ten, perhaps, that his absence wouldn’t be discovered, but dare he risk it? At Yardley you were put on your honor as regarded attendance at chapel. Should you stay away you were expected to report the fact to the office and tender an explanation. But, thought Toby, what explanation could he offer? Doctor Collins would scarcely accept the true one as sufficient, and, if it came to concocting a lie, why he might just as well say nothing and trust to luck. Failure to report his absence would be no more dishonorable than lying about! Toby studied the quandary troubledly for a good ten minutes. Then he pulled his cap on, thrust his hands determinedly into his pockets and made straight for the Office.