To-day was Thorn’s birthday. Impelled by a tender, tepid feeling of self-pity the instructor had come once more to the club to look at it and say good-bye before leaving Cambridge. He would have liked to breakfast on the piazza and suffer luxuriously alone. But just at the moment he was beginning to feel most deeply, Sears Wolcott appeared at the open French window, and said he was “Going to eat out there in the landscape too.” So Thorn, in spite of himself, had to revive. “What did you think of the Pudding show last night?” began Sears. Talk with him usually meant leading questions and their simplest answers. “It was very amusing--very well done,” said Thorn. What was the use, he asked himself, of drawing a cow-eyed stare from Wolcott by saying what he really thought--that Strawberry Night at the Pudding had been “exuberant,” “noisy,” “intensely young.” “I saw you after it was over,” Sears went on; “why didn’t you buck up with the old grads around the piano? You looked lonely.” “I was lonely,” answered Thorn, truthfully this time. “Where were your classmates? There was a big crowd out.” “My classmates? Oh, they were there, I suppose. I haven’t seen much of them this year.” Wolcott’s next question was:-- “Why the devil can’t we have better strawberries at this club, I wonder? Where’s the granulated sugar? They know I never eat this damned face powder on anything.” He called loudly for the steward, and Thorn went on with his breakfast in silence. After Sears had been appeased with granulated sugar, he asked:-- “Going to be here next year?” “I’ve been reappointed; but I think I shall live in town. Why do you ask?” “Oh, nothing--I was thinking I might take your courses. What mark is Prescott going to get for the year?” Thorn looked up to meet Wolcott’s eyes unflinchingly; but the boy was deeply absorbed in studying the little air bubbles on the surface of his coffee. “I don’t know what mark he’ll get. I haven’t looked at his book yet,” said Thorn. Sears remarked “Oh!” and laughed as he submerged the bubbles with a spoon. It was unlike him not to have said, “You do go through the formality of reading his books then?” Prescott and Wynne joined them. They chattered gaily with Wolcott about nothing out there on the piazza, and watched the slim lady on the other side of the nodding lilac bushes cut nasturtiums. Thorn listened to them, and looked at them, and liked them; but he couldn’t be one of them, even for the moment. He couldn’t babble unpremeditatedly about nothing, because he had forgotten how it was done. So, in a little while, he got up to leave them. He had to mark some examination books and pack his trunks and go abroad, he told them. He said good-bye to Prescott and Wolcott and Wynne and some others who had come in while they were at breakfast, and hoped they would have “a good summer.” They hoped the same to him.