When Hewitt returned to Claverly by a circuitous way through the College Yard, and out again into the empty triangular Square, he found a dumpy, patient-looking herdic cab drawn up to the curbstone. The driver had tucked away his money somewhere in the region of his portly waist, and was pulling his coat over the spot, preparatory to mounting the box. But the tall young man in evening dress, who apparently had just paid him, had not yet turned to pass through the brightly lighted doorway. Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk, and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat, boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. Horace scarcely knew why he himself lingered over an affair so personal and so manifestly not his own. He found justification for his curiosity, however,--although it was characteristic neither of his college nor himself,--when the object of it started slowly and aimlessly down the street, leaving his overcoat on the bricks, where it had dropped. The garment was a light, slender thing, and as Horace hung it over his arm and smoothed its soft lining with his fingers, he wondered more what its wearer was like, than what he should do with it. It was easy enough to keep the coat in his room until--as was sure to happen--an advertisement, somewhat vague as to where the article had been lost, appeared in the “Harvard Crimson,” or he might restore it at once to its owner, who by this time had stopped undecidedly in the black shadow on the nearest street-corner. There was something companionable in the way the coat clung to his arm, that made him wish to keep it a little longer; but he ended by doing the simpler thing. “Isn’t this your overcoat?” he said, walking up to the sharp line of shadow on the other side of which the shirt bosom and face of the drunken student showed faintly. Hewitt broke the pause that followed by repeating his question. “Oh, how good of you! I had half decided to go after it,” came from the darkness in an astonishingly clear, fresh voice, whose convincing mastery of the first letter of the alphabet left little doubt as to its possessor’s birthplace. Had not the words been said with a formality that, under the circumstances, was absurd, Hewitt would have felt that he misjudged the man’s condition. “Don’t mind me, really, I’m very, very tight.” It was impossible to misconstrue this statement, or the wild, exultant over-emphasis with which the final word was declaimed. Hewitt laughed. “Oh, are you?” he answered, adding, “well, here’s your overcoat,” as if these two facts existed only in conjunction.