all your attention to the watch. It's just like being one of the team, isn't it?"
"Well," Perry said carelessly, "it's not exactly that."
This was another thing new to him, having somebody tag along at his elbow. He was not without vanity; he found the experience pleasant. Even if the tagger was only Johnnie Baffin, it showed that already his position was felt and marked.
Baffin was, perhaps, the least of all the Northfield students. Every high school has a few of his kind—good-natured but dull fellows who find the simplest studies hard, who are baffled by problems demanding thought and analysis, and who blunder along in a sort of scared and pathetic helplessness. They have no opinions of their own, follow blindly where the more venturesome lead, and contribute absolutely nothing to the welfare of their schools. How Johnnie Baffin had managed to get through his freshman and sophomore years was the ever-present Northfield mystery. It was a mystery to Johnnie, too. Only the faculty knew how narrow the margin of his escape. Had he dropped out of school his going would have created not even a ripple. The boy in the next seat might not have marked that he had gone. For even in a crowd he was always
