When he came to the thought of dropping it, he suspected that it was no longer a josh where he himself was concerned. The realization of this quite stunned him, the afternoon it came to him. They were sitting below the Sphinx, at the back of the Mausoleum, and the quail were calling among the pines. Katharine was reading to him from one of his text-books. He heard very little of what she read. To him the book kept repeating that she had the most attractive mouth and chin he had ever noticed; that the low-drawn hair on her forehead was made to be smoothed back, very gently, from her clear skin. The consciousness that he could not give up these study-afternoons came over him with a stab, and told him that he had not been listening at all well lately; that this was why he could not remember the stuff in recitation and why he had not dared to tell her his recent marks. She trusted him so thoroughly now that she did not stop him so often when he talked, instead of working. If she had guessed the real reason of his laziness, she would have been honestly disappointed in him. This was the tragedy of it. He could never let her suspect that he was not still fooling the Rho house. She was a girl entirely without sentimentality--this was what he liked in her at first, and now it was his overthrow. If she should so much as dream that his feeling toward her was anything more than the friendship he had outlined in the beginning, she would shut her book with a slap and declare the compact at an end. He must keep on acting, only his audience had changed and the people he had been joking with were now behind the scenes, though they didn't know it. So he would put his chin in his hand and gaze at her as though the peculiarities of the Renaissance Poets were his greatest concern. He laughed, too, about the joke itself, finding a sort of painful relief in _double entendre_. Sometimes his mind wandered, and when Katharine failed to reprove him, as in the earlier days of the compact, he felt as though he had betrayed a confidence. Once they had forgotten all about football practice, and it frightened him; but she seemed not to have realized the gravity of the thing, and he laughed the alarming incident away. During lectures, he tried to reason himself out of the predicament. It was entirely possible that this feeling toward her was but another instance of habit, a natural affection for a chum, with some subtle influence of sex combining to frighten him into thinking it more serious. But he was not entirely comforted.