“Bowles? Yes, he’s been looking after me ever since I was out of the nursery. He’s a little bit of all right, Bowles.” Ordway seated himself on the farther end of the seat, looked interestedly about the campus, no longer silent and empty, and finally turned his gaze to Bert. Again the color crept into his cheeks and he said diffidently, almost stammeringly: “I say, Winslow, I hope you’re going to like me, you know.” CHAPTER V HUGH FINDS A WORD Half an hour later, having left his new roommate to the business of unpacking his trunk, Bert was in Number 12, and he and Nick and Guy Murtha, their host, were talking it over. “We saw him on the train just after we left the city,” Guy was saying. “Some of us had been in the diner and when we came back through the parlor car we saw this chap and the man with him. They had a table and the kid was eating a lunch out of a box and the chap in the derby hat was waiting on him, or, anyway, that’s how it looked. He’d take a sandwich out of the box and put it on the kid’s plate and then he’d move the mustard nearer and sort of fuss over the table. He wasn’t eating a thing himself. I suppose he ate at second table!” Guy was a tall fellow of eighteen, a senior and captain of the nine. He was not a handsome youth; rather plain, in fact; but he had so many likable qualities that one soon forgot that his nose was short and broad, that his heavy eyebrows met above it, that his mouth was large and somewhat loose and that his pale eyes, of a washed-out blue, were too small. He had a jolly laugh and a pleasant, deep voice that won friends. Nick chuckled. “When they got off at the Junction the man got confused and tried to get back on the express again, and your friend stood in the middle of the platform, with his hands in his pockets, and shouted: ‘Bowles, you silly ass, came back here!’ Everyone laughed like the dickens.” “He’s English,” said Bert dismally. “Bowles? Rawther!” “Ordway, too. I asked him. He was born in England; I forget where; is there a place called Pants?” “Not in England, dear boy,” remonstrated Nick. “It would be Trousers.” “Hants, you mean,” said Guy. “Somewhere in the south of England.” “That’s it, Hants. His father is English, he says, and his mother American. They live in Maryland now.” “Nice-looking chap,” said Guy. Bert nodded. “Yes,” he agreed doubtfully. “Yes, he’s a nice-looking kid, but――――” His voice dwindled to silence. Nick laughed. “Cheer up, old scout! He can’t be awfully British if he has an American mama and lives in ‘Maryland, my Maryland.’ Bet you the sodas he will be singing ‘Dixie’ when you get back!” “More likely ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘God Save the King,’” replied Bert ruefully. After a moment: “He’s got awfully smooth manners,” he added grudgingly. “Makes me feel like a――an Indian.” “Wish he might have kept Bowles here with him,” said Nick regretfully. “It would have given Lothrop a lot of class!”