“Oh, I don’t mind his smoking,” said John, with the faintest emphasis on the last word. “No?” Haydock kept his back turned, and continued to touch delicately, here and there, the corners of his picture frames. As a matter of fact, he made some of them rather more crooked than they were at first. But he felt that if he didn’t deter John by turning suddenly and giving him all attention, he would hear the whole story; John very evidently had brought one with him. “Of course, I don’t smoke, myself,” John went on slowly; “it’s just happened that way, I suppose. But I don’t mind it in Billy. You can always stop if it begins to hurt you. I think I like to see him do it,” he ended, with unusual tolerance. “Yes,” agreed Haydock, deliberately, “if it hurts you, you can always stop smoking.” He, too, emphasised the last word softly, in a way that left the tale still untold. Haydock was something of an artist in assisting confidences where the spirit was willing and the vocabulary weak. “Ware is really a bully chap; he was a perfect corker at school.” John’s remark was a circuitous paraphrase of, “Isn’t it too bad!” “He certainly is most attractive; I’ve rarely known anybody who was more so,” Haydock assented, with an enthusiasm he genuinely felt; “but I don’t see much of him now.” His regret, too, was real. “That’s it! that’s just it!” John burst out so hotly that the senior, who was filling his pipe at the table, almost looked up in ill-timed surprise. “Nobody sees anything of him any more; nobody who ought to, like you.” “And you,” added Haydock, to himself. The situation was perennial; he divined it perfectly. “Nobody but that damned Dilford Bancroft and that gang,” continued John. “Billy could know any one in the class that’s worth knowing; he really does know every one. But you understand what I mean, they’re not his friends; he doesn’t go to their rooms, and they don’t come to ours. It’s always Bancroft and just a few sports like that.” “Cheap sports?” Haydock questioned. He knew no more of Bancroft than that he was a decorative young person whose somewhat liberal views on the subject of training for a foot-ball eleven had stirred a ripple of indignation throughout the college in the autumn, and provoked some caustic reflections in the editorial columns of the “Harvard Crimson.” “No, I don’t suppose they’re ‘cheap’ sports,” admitted the honest John,--“not the way you mean.” “Expensive sports, then?” “Well, if you mean that they seem to know how to do the things that oughtn’t to be done at all, the way they ought to be done, if you do them--” began John, a trifle obscurely. “Yes, that’s precisely what I mean.” “Then they are ‘expensive’ sports, I suppose.” “And Billy has become absorbed by them?” “He doesn’t care to see any one else, as far as I know.” “Perhaps it’s merely a passing phase.” “I can’t see that that cuts any particular ice, if he is going to be ruined before it passes,” John objected.