“I was tickled blue when Guy won that last pot from Boerick,” said Chester, as they went up the street. “I lost about twenty, but I don’t mind as long as he didn’t get it.” “Yes,” answered Phillip abstractedly. On the avenue they parted and Phillip went home to his room. He undressed thoughtfully, donned a nightshirt, lighted a short pipe and stretched himself out on the bed, his arms beneath his head. Maid, after a moment of consideration, crept up beside him and went to sleep there with long sighs of happiness. After the pipe had burned out and grown cold it still hung from between clenched teeth. Phillip was thinking. CHAPTER VIII Football affairs at Harvard went so smoothly that autumn, and promised so well that the local prophets were unanimous in declaring that “unless there came a slump at the critical moment” or “barring serious injuries to the players” or “if the present steady improvement in team-work continued,” Harvard would score a victory in the final game. A well-known authority (writing from New Haven), whose weekly articles were syndicated throughout the country, expressed the opinion――carefully hidden in a column and a half of close type――that, unless Yale played considerably better than her present performance promised, or Harvard failed to justify the hopes of her coaches, the contest would be an extremely close and interesting one, and that victory, by whoever won, would be well deserved. At Cambridge, coaches and captain and trainer put on very lugubrious expressions whenever the ’varsity was mentioned, and scratched wood and also muttered “_unberufen_” on even the slightest provocation.