John North was out on the field daily for the better part of two hours, dressed in togs that would have disgraced an old clothes man if found in his possession. His efforts were chiefly directed at the guards, and the way in which he seized those weighty players and pushed them about was beautiful to see. After a particularly hard afternoon’s practice he was ready to admit that coaching was stiffer work than being coached. And there were evening meetings which had a way of coming when most inconvenient, and at which he was expected to deliver terse homilies on breaking through and blocking and other artifices of the game. With it all he had little opportunity for cultivating the further acquaintance of Phillip and enacting the rôle of guardian to that youth. He told himself daily that he was derelict in his duty, and promised to find time the next day to look up his charge and salve his conscience. But his good resolutions came to naught. On Sunday evenings Phillip always showed up at his room, and the three, often reinforced by the presence of a visitor, spent a pleasant hour or two. David spoke of them as family gatherings and dutifully kept awake until they had broken up. But John found that Phillip since the previous Sunday had undergone experiences and made friends quite on his own hook and was generally managing his affairs without recourse to the maturer advice of John or David or anybody else. So far, John was sure the boy had not “broken out of pasture,” as Corliss put it. Chester Baker and Guy Bassett and Everett Kingsford were all straightforward, healthy-minded fellows, than whom no better associates could have fallen to Phillip’s lot. But, as John told himself with compunction, that Phillip had been so fortunate in his choice of friends was due to no help of his. He had replied to Corliss’s letter and had promised to look after Phillip. And he hadn’t kept his promise, or, at least, not fully. And then there was Margaret! What would Margaret think of him if she knew how illy he was executing his trust? For some reason it was always the latter thought that troubled him most. And so one day――it was during the first week in November; a leaden, cheerless afternoon, with a stinging wind blowing across Soldiers’ Field from the river――John came out of the locker building an hour earlier than usual and, with the sparks blowing from his pipe-bowl, strode across the yellowing turf toward where, from the shelter of a little, iron-sheathed hut at the far end of the field, puffs of white smoke told that the Shooting Club were at practice. John nodded to several fellows he knew and found a sheltered corner. Phillip was shooting, a straight, wide-hipped, graceful figure in an old canvas coat, his battered Winchester shotgun, in noticeable contrast to the highly polished Scotts and Dalys that John saw about him, held easily before him. “_Ready!_” “_Pull!_”