At the end of a week he prepared to leave. But Billy couldn't see it that way. It was true that Polly was going to have a couple of girl friends at the house next week, and would want Neale's room, but then they'd want Bill's room too. If Billy was to be exiled to a tent, why couldn't Crit keep him company? They'd move the tent up into the Glen, and really camp out, cook their own grub and everything. Crit had said he wanted to camp out! Why not? After all there wasn't any real reason why he should go...! Next week there was the coaching parade, and all sorts of fun, decorating the hotel three-seater, with ferns and daisies. Then there was a boating excursion to Long Pond where Sarah Davis fell overboard and Neale pulled her out. Then there was a fateful straw-ride in the August full moon, very near to Neale's nineteenth birthday, and there he met Miss Austin, a new arrival at the hotel. She was almost as tall as Neale, which was very tall indeed for a girl, and she looked to Neale as though she might have stepped right out of a Gibson illustration. This utterly superlative impression of beauty and good form was not lessened even in broad daylight the next morning, when he saw her again on the tennis-court, where she said good-morning with a special look for him in her very fine gray eyes. She did not play tennis, she sat on a bench at the side, under a purple silk parasol, her long, full, white skirts frilling out in a plaited cone, her pretty, fluffy, brown hair arranged in a high pompadour, which stayed impeccable as the tennis-playing girls grew hot and red, their hair straggling in straight wisps across their shining wet foreheads. Had Neale ever thought he scorned girls who sat cool and dressed-up on a bench while others played tennis? As soon as the set was over, he went to sit beside her. She glanced at him out of her gray eyes and looked away again. Neale's pulse beat more quickly and he looked hard at the curve of her cheek. Then they began to talk. Before she went in to lunch, she had told him with a wistful note in her voice, that she was glad she'd met him, because most of the people at the hotel bored her so. Neale answered (the truth striking him for the first time), that _most_ of the people bored him too.