“I? Oh, I was thinking of going over to Claverly to see Haydock,”--Haydock was a senior. “He asked us to drop in often, you know,” said John, so casually that, after the manner of absolutely honest persons who attempt a subtlety, he “gave himself away.” “Translated, I suppose that means I haven’t been there very often--that I haven’t been there at all, in fact?” said Billy, sweetly. He was thinking to himself that when John aimed at “foxiness,” he usually made a very successful cow of himself. “I may have been thinking that,” admitted John, blushing a little; “but you really haven’t been there, you know, and after the way you didn’t turn up the night he asked us to dine--” “Turn up? Turn up?” said Billy, with a giggle at an imagined picture of himself turning up at the Victoria to dine with Haydock and John. “Why, man, I was dead to the world--I was a corpse! Turn up? I turned up about two days later, and didn’t know where I was then. If you had any gratitude in your withered old gizzard, you’d never stop thanking me for not turning up.” “It wasn’t the right thing,” was John’s comment. The appearance just then of Dilly Bancroft, for whom Billy was waiting, averted the discussion--the one-sided kind Rice and Ware always had--in which Billy played matadore and picador, with grace and agility, to John’s brave but ineffectual bull. “I’m all ready. Let’s dash along; you’re late, Dilly,” said Billy, slipping into his coat. He had a keen instinct in the matter of personal antagonisms. He always felt them long before they were expressed, often before they were even conceived. John had never said much of anything about Billy’s friend Bancroft--not even when that young man had seen fit to break training some months before, on the Freshman Eleven. But in spite of John’s hearty (suspiciously hearty, thought Billy), “Hello, Dilford, how are you?” Billy knew. Anything of the kind annoyed him--especially in his own room, where he felt it his right to have whom he pleased. He escaped with Bancroft as soon as possible. John struck him just then as a very tiresome person to be saddled with. The two left, looking so clean and well-bred and young and altogether inconsequent in their good clothes, that John could not but smile to himself and think kindly of them for a moment as they clattered down the stairs and out into the Yard.