He had carried a letter from Mabel unopened in his pocket for half a day, and he really found it growing difficult for him to write. He no longer felt thrilled by the mental picture he drew of her, standing at the head of the rickety old stairs that led from the store to the second story of the frame house in Oakland, and even her photograph (with her hair beautifully frizzed with a hot iron), that he had on the mantelpiece of his room in Edwards, failed to stir him. She was very different from—from some one else, the tones of whose voice would not leave his mind, and yet who was as far above him as the stars above the earth—the way he looked at it.
All this made him very unhappy, and made him think that he was somehow a very mean individual, and resulted in his studying harder and playing football with a grim, cool determination in which, perchance, he found some relief.
Miss Hollingsworth had been present at the game with Lafayette the day before, and upon one occasion, when he had dashed through the crowd and fallen on the ball outside the boundary, he had looked up and caught her eye as
