cheerfulness in the expectation of seeing her on the morrow; and he went to bed early to escape the shivering dampness of his room and to hasten the arrival of their next meeting by sleeping through as much as possible of the interval.
Although he suffered, next day, with a heavy aching in his back and his legs, he went to intercept her earlier than usual, in the fear that he might have been late on the previous afternoon; and in a piercing wind that pricked him as if with tiny needles of ice through his clothes, he watched for her for an hour, until the horrible certainty that she must be ill and unable to send him word hurried him home in a panic of anxiety, resolved to call and inquire for her that night. By this time his head was aching with the fever of influenza and he was half choked with a sore throat. He gulped his supper, unable to taste it, and hurried out to get Conroy to accompany him to the Kimball house.
It was a dripping black night, foggy and cold, with hidden pools in the crossings and feeble street lamps to see them by. He splashed through them in anxious haste, holding—with a bare hand—his overcoat closed on the aperture of a missing button at the neck. He made a short cut across the college campus through the sodden grass, and came to the Residence wing like the midnight caller for a country doctor in a matter of life and death. He saw a light in Conroy's window as he swung under the arch that opened on the "quadrangle." He heard a shout of songs as he sprang up the stairs
