Coach Loring came to him while he was dressing. “Beech is going to practice with you in the morning, Tucker,” he said. “At eleven. He will tell you what days he’s free. Let me know when he can’t be there and I’ll arrange with some one else――or do it myself. I noticed you used your body more to-day in stopping shots. It’s the best plan. Keep it up, Tucker.” But in spite of all this encouragement Toby wasn’t really happy that evening. Supper had been a trying affair. Of course neither he nor Arnold had even so much as glanced at each other, much less spoken, and he was conscious all during the meal of the amused or inquiring glances of the other occupants of Table 14. He wondered whether he could get himself moved to another table, but abandoned the idea the next moment. He had done nothing and wasn’t going to run away as though he had. If Arnold didn’t like eating with him, why, let Arnold move. He put in an hour of study and then pressed Will Curran’s trousers, and a suit belonging to another boy, and tried very hard to concoct a rhymed reply to Curran’s missive. But rhyming was not Toby’s forte and he gave it up finally and climbed into bed to lie awake a long while in the darkness, thinking rather unhappy thoughts about life. Grover Beech was awaiting him at the rink the next morning at a few minutes past eleven and, after they had shooed a half-dozen preparatory class boys from the ice, they set to work. Toby liked the long and lank second team captain and his respect for the latter’s skating and shooting prowess increased remarkably during that fifty minutes of work. “I don’t know just what the silly idea is,” Beech remarked as he dropped the puck and circled back toward the middle of the rink with it, “but here goes, Tucker!” Beech tore down toward goal, zig-zagging, playing the puck first on one side and then on the other, dug his skates when a few yards away, swept past and, at the last moment, flicked the disk cunningly past Toby’s skates. Toby fished it out of the net ruefully, and Beech laughed. “Keep your eyes open, Tucker!” he called, skating backward and dragging the puck in the crook of his blade. “Loring says he wants you to have practice, son, and I mean to give it to you. So watch your eye, boy!” “Let her come!” laughed Toby. [Illustration: “LET HER COME!” LAUGHED TOBY] And come she did, a long shot that skimmed through the air a foot above the ice and made straight for the center of the net. Toby silently applauded that shot even as he bent and brought his leg-guards together. There was a _thud_ and the disk bounded yards away. Beech, who had followed it up, tried to snap it in, but he was skating too fast and the puck struck the side post. “Good stop,” he applauded. “Thought I had you then.” “It was a peach of a shot,” called Toby. “Give me some more like that, will you? Those are the sort I want to learn to stop.”