The hours that Dink Stover sat puffing his pipe before the yellow-eyed owls that blinked to him from the crackling fireplace were hours of revolution. His imagination, stirred by the recital of Swazey's life, returned to him like some long-lost friend. Sunk back in his familiar arm-chair, his legs extended almost to the reddening logs, his arms braced, he seemed to see through the conjuring clouds of smoke that rose from his pipe the figures of a strange self, the Dink Stover who had fought his way to manhood in the rough tests of boarding-school life, the Dink Stover who had arrived so eagerly, whose imagination had leaped to the swelling masses of that opening night and called for the first cheer in the name of the whole class. That figure was stranger to him than the stranger in his own entry. Together they sat looking into each other's eyes, in shy recognition, while overhead on every quarter-hour the bell from Battell Chapel announced the march toward midnight. Several times, as he sat plunged in reverie, a knock sounded imperiously on the locked door; but he made no move. Once from the campus below he heard Dopey McNab's gleeful voice mingling with the deep bass of Buck Waters: "_Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,_ _And we have all the fun._ _That's the way we do in college life._ _Hooray!_" [Illustration: "'OH, FATHER AND MOTHER PAY ALL THE BILLS, AND WE HAVE ALL THE FUN'"--_Page 229._] For a moment the song was choked, and then he heard it ring in triumphant crescendo as the two came up his steps, pounding out the rhythm with enthusiastic feet. Before his door they came to a stop, sang the chorus to a rattling accompaniment of their fists, and exclaimed: "Oh, Dink Stover, open up!" Receiving no response, they consulted: "Why, the geezer isn't in." "Let's break down the door." "What right has he to be out?" "Is there any one else we can annoy around here?" "Bob Story is in the next entry." "Lead me to him." "About face!" "March!" "_Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,_ _And we have all the fun:_ _That's the way we do--_" The sound died out. Upstairs a piano took up the refrain in a thin, syncopated echo. From time to time a door slammed in his entry, or from without the faint halloo: "Oh, Jimmy, stick out your head." Dink, shifting, poked another log into place and returned longingly to his reverie. He could not get from his mind what Swazey had told him. His imagination reconstructed the story that had been given in such bare detail, thrilling at the struggle and the drama he perceived back of it. It was all undivined. When he had thought of his classmates, he had thought of them in a matter-of-fact way as lives paralleling his own. "Wonder what Regan's story is--the whole story?" he thought musingly. "And Pike and all the rest of--" He hesitated, and then added, "--of the fellows who don't count."