There was light work on Monday for the regulars, although those who had not participated strenuously in Saturday’s contest were given the usual medicine. On Tuesday there was a hard practice, and, in the evening, an hour’s signal drill in the gymnasium. The program was the same the next day. That afternoon, Bert, if he still entertained hopes, must have seen the futility of them. For he spent the whole period of scrimmaging on the bench and saw Hugh occupying the place he had looked on as his. Although no official statement to the effect was made by the coaches, it was generally understood that the line-up that day was the one which would face Mount Morris on Saturday. Of course Bert would get into the game for a while beyond the shadow of a doubt, but that brought no satisfaction to him. What increased his sense of injury was the fact that the day before, playing two of the four ten-minute periods against the scrubs, he had held his own with any of them. And he knew now that if he could only get in on Saturday he could play the game of his life! Perhaps it was a final realization of his defeat that changed his attitude toward Hugh that evening. When both boys were back in the study after the signal work in the gymnasium Bert volunteered a remark in a very casual but surprisingly inoffensive voice. Hugh answered in kind, and, rather embarrassedly, they fell into a discussion of the plays they had rehearsed, of the team’s chances, and of kindred subjects. Then, when Hugh had gone to bed and his light was out, Bert’s voice reached him from his doorway. “Say, Hugh!” “Yes?” An instant’s silence, and then: “I’m sorry I’ve been such a rotter.” “Oh, that’s all right, Bert!” “Yes, but――――” Another silence, and finally: “It isn’t all right at all! I――oh, well, what’s the use? I’m sorry. I guess that’s the whole yarn. It isn’t your fault, you know, and I――I hope you do fine, old man! Just rip ’em right up the back!” “Thanks,” replied Hugh in the darkness, “but I wish it were going to be you, Bert, honest! I don’t want to play a mite. I’m beastly sorry I――I――――” “Oh, rot!” “But I am, though! I feel an awful ass, if you know what I mean; butting in like this and doing you out of your place on the team when I can’t begin to play the way you do, old chap! It――it’s piffling poppycock! That’s what it is! Piffling poppycock!” He appeared to derive a lot of satisfaction from the phrase, and Bert heard him mutter it over again to himself as he felt his way into the room and sat on the foot of Hugh’s bed. “No,” he said, tucking his feet up out of the draft from the open window, “no, that’s not true. You play just as good a game as I ever did, Hugh. You can’t get around that. And what’s a heap more, you’re steady. I never was. I’d play good enough one day and then be perfectly rotten the next, maybe. What gets me, though, is how the dickens you ever learned in only about eight weeks!”