Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a little from side to side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes shone. He was standing with his feet well apart, his hands deep in his pockets; he laughed, reddening to his forehead, but he was not embarrassed. For once David's old look of silent, friendly admiration did not answer him; instead there was half-bewildered dismay. David wanted to protest that it wasn't--well, it wasn't _fair_. He did not say it; and in not saying it he ceased to be a boy. "I suppose it was when you and she went off after dinner? You needn't have been so darned quiet about it! What's the good of being so--mum about everything? Why didn't you come back and tell? You're not ashamed of it, are you?" "A man doesn't tell a thing like that," Blair said scornfully. "Well!" David snorted, "I suppose some time you'll be married?" Blair nodded again. "Right off." "Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only sixteen. Don't be an ass." "I'll be seventeen next May." "Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I haven't thought of being married;--at least to anybody in particular." "You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash." David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I thought you and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't talk to each other at all. I thought you were both huffy; and instead of that--" David paused. "That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for his grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment in the hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear out. I can't stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a hotel till I go to college; I'll--" "Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him viciously. Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,--David was jealous! "Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here," he began, "I didn't know that _you_--" "I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in contemptuously; "if you think _I_ care, one way or the other, you're mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned on his heel. It was a hot July afternoon; the sun-baked street along which they had been walking was deep with black dust and full of the clamor of traffic. Four big gray Flemish horses, straining against their breastplates, were hauling a dray loaded with clattering iron rods; the sound, familiar enough to any Mercer boy, seemed to David at that moment intolerable. "I'll get out of this cursed noise," he said to himself, and turned down a narrow street toward the river. It occurred to him that he would go over the covered bridge, and maybe stop and get a tumbler of ice-cream at Mrs. Todd's. Then he would strike out into the country and take a walk; he had nothing else to do. This vacation business wasn't all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow.