She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the moonlight. "You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still veneer." It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been afraid it was the truth. "Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years ago. Betty! Betty!" She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite clear. "Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I--I----Listen! What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from? You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please----" She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand. "Good-night, George." He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away, whispering breathlessly: "Let me go now!" He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across the lawn away from him. The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come to kill. When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest of football players, big man of his class, already with greedy fingers in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass and fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his eyes from filling with tears. PART III THE MARKET-PLACE I George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received class day or on the afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese parasol, he led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified him for each other. The man that had done most for Princeton! He admitted he had done a good deal for himself. Of course, Squibs was right and he was abnormally selfish; only it was too bad Betty couldn't have thought so. He had tried to make her and had failed, he told himself, because Betty couldn't understand selfishness. He avoided during those last days every chance of seeing her alone; but even in the presence of others he was aware of an alteration in her manner, to be traced, doubtless, to the night of his difficult confession. She was kinder, but her eyes were often puzzled, as if she couldn't understand why he didn't want to see her alone.