the stirring of a hope which would not be still. . . . She had quarrelled with Conroy, too, about the photograph. She had been asking Conroy about him. She had been thinking of him all these weeks, and expecting to see him. Perhaps she had come to meet him that morning when he had turned back from her at the college gate. . . . He said to Conroy, smiling absent-mindedly in the darkness: "You're well out of there, anyway. If the Dean doesn't write home about it"
"No, he'll not do that. He said he wouldn't. He said he thought I should leave Residence, but that no one need know why. He talked a lot of punky cant—about doing it for my own good. He's a snivelling codfish, anyway. All the boys loathe him."
"Well, we'd better get a sleep now. Good-night."
"Good-night. . . . I'll get even with him some day."
He was breathing in a heavy stupor of sleep when Don was still lying awake, smiling at the blackness, open-eyed.
X
The spring had come early, in a sudden heat of sunlight that steamed the snow off the hillsides and warmed the moist air to the temperature of a hothouse. The grass had greened as if it were in a forcing-bed; the twigs of the trees had flushed and budded miraculously; the birds had come out chirping and fluttering on the lawns, in busy possession of a world which they had seized and settled overnight. And on a
