IT was the noon half-hour at Marston High, and boys and girls were crowding into the little bakery familiarly known among them as the “eat-house.”

Louise Markham and Jacquette had been lucky enough to get a seat at one of the three oilcloth-covered tables, but by far the larger number, with their sandwiches in their hands, were good-naturedly jostling for standing-room.

Jacquette had decided that day, after a few weeks of single-handed effort, to take Louise into her confidence about the bargain with Aunt Sula, and Louise’s hearty response had been an immense relief. “Your aunt’s exactly right!” she had declared. “She’s gone straight to the weak points of Sigma Pi. Talk about a sorority helping scholarship! The only thing that has saved my scholarship at Marston is the fact that my mother wouldn’t let me go Sigma Pi until I was a junior, and, even since then, it has been hard work to keep sorority business from interfering with my school work. I believe any girl that gets deep in sorority doings the first year of high school will have trouble straightening things out and doing well with her studies the rest of the time, and I want you to tell your Aunt Sula, Jacquette, that I’ll stand by and work for every reform she asked for. I can propose things, being a senior, that the girls wouldn’t take from you, and I believe we can accomplish something.”

“Oh, Louise, you’re such a splendid——” Jacquette began, but Louise nudged her to be quiet. Two boys had slipped into places which had been vacated on the opposite side of the table, and, as Jacquette looked up, she found herself gazing into the blue eyes of Bobs Drake.

Bobs had scarcely seated himself and ordered a glass of milk from the distracted young waitress, who was answering wild calls for “redhots!” and “soup!” from all directions at once, before the boys and girls began to swarm about him.

“I hear you’ve gone into training, now, Bobs, just like a ’varsity man,” began one of the boys. “They’re telling around that you live on birdseed and mush, and take long runs in the early morning. Is that right?”

“He wouldn’t come over to the frat house, last night, anyway,” put in Lawrence Beach. “I understand he’s started going to bed at six, now.”

“Then we’ll have to go around and serenade him,” proposed Rex Morton. “We’ll give him, ‘Oh, does it not seem hard to you?’” He hummed the first line, and the crowd of boys and girls took it up:

they sang plaintively, while Bobs sat sipping his glass of milk with a good-humoured smile on his sunburned face.

As the joking went on, Jacquette knew, whether she looked at Bobs or not, that his eyes were almost constantly on her. She wondered why. It flattered and embarrassed her at the same time, and she was glad and sorry when Louise proposed to go. A moment later, in brushing past him on her way out, she was astonished to have him slip a folded note into her hand.

“Louise, he’s written something to me!” she exclaimed, as soon as they reached the street. “Let’s see what it says.” She unfolded the paper and together the two girls read:

“Do I know him well enough? Say yes, Louise!” Jacquette demanded. “Blanche Gross introduced him to me the day after that Indian performance and I’ve talked with him in the halls some, since then, but I never dreamed of his giving me a second thought, when he’s so popular, and I’m just a freshman. Blanche says he has the dandiest morals of any boy she knows. What do you think, Louise?”

“Oh, he’s nice. I’ve known him all my life and his mother is one of our best friends, but he’s not a Beta Sig, and Quis isn’t going to like it if you choose friends outside of his frat.”

“H’m! Quis doesn’t own me. Besides, I have to treat all fraternities alike, according to the bargain with Aunt Sula,” Jacquette declared, virtuously, and immediately began to compose her reply to Bobs.

That reply consumed a large part of the study-hour following. The momentous questions involved were: first, how to begin; second, what to say; third, how to end.

If Bobs were any other boy, it would be right to call him “Mr.,” but no one in the school said “Mr. Drake.” Everyone said “Bobs.” His real name was Robin Sidney Drake, but that was absurd for Bobs! Besides, he had signed himself “Bobs.”

Meantime a procession of Aunt Sula’s admonitions in regard to writing notes to boys haunted Jacquette like ghosts, and made her tear up effort after effort. When the last was finally completed it read as follows:

She laid this circumspect epistle on Bobs’s desk as she passed out of the study-room to her English class, and two minutes later Blanche Gross, acting the part of a Sigma Pi guardian, came hurrying after, and sitting down beside her, said reprovingly:

“You shouldn’t write notes to Bobs Drake, Jacquette. The minute you were out of the room he showed it to Rex Morton, and they both laughed.”

“Let them!” Jacquette returned, flushing. “There was nothing in it that the whole world mightn’t see. That’s the only kind of note I ever write to boys, and I didn’t learn the habit from Sigma Pi Epsilon, either!”

Then, having heaped her secret vexation with Bobs and Rex on the head of Blanche, who was the most prolific writer of notes in the whole sorority, Jacquette proceeded to give conspicuous attention to her English teacher.

It was an eventful moment when she walked down the street from Marston with the broad-shouldered captain of the football team at her side, and Jacquette hugely enjoyed the sensation she knew she was causing among the girls. Then they turned the corner, and, without giving her time to puzzle longer, Bobs began abruptly:

“I suppose you’re wondering what I want, and I’ll tell you, to begin, that I never would have written you that note if I hadn’t believed that you’re absolutely square.”

If Jacquette had heard herself called a princess among women she could not have felt more pleased—and her face showed it.

“Of course you know,” Bobs continued, “that our team has won every game it has played against any other school this fall?”

“I think I do!” she flashed, saucily.

“And you know that the next game is the last of the season—the one that decides the championship for the year.” Bobs cleared his throat, and Jacquette waited.

“Well, of course you know that, according to the rules at Marston, if a football man’s average for the week falls below on the day before the game, he’s debarred from playing. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

She wondered what was coming.

“The point is this: I’ve had a hard pull to keep above in my studies and keep the team in shape, too, and I haven’t always done it, either. You probably know that I missed playing in two games this season, because I was below, those two weeks. But, such marks as I have had, I’ve earned myself. I haven’t had credit for a stroke of work that was done by anyone else.”

“Of course not!”

He looked at her curiously. “It’s a common thing, you know, for the fellows on the team to have someone else do their studying during the season,” he explained, defensively. “But I’ve stood against it, and they all know it. That’s the reason I’m in such an awkward box, now. The fact is, I’m below in my English this week, and, besides all the rest of the work, there are two themes lacking, and, to make it as bad as it could be, one of those themes is a sonnet!”

“But Bobs, a sonnet—that’s easy!”

“That’s what I’ve heard about you,” he answered, hurriedly. “They say you can write poetry as easy as breathing. Now, you wouldn’t believe it could be done, but I’ve managed, all through my high school course, to steer clear of sonnets. I believe it’s a put-up job, anyway, requiring so much extra work this week. I have English with Miss Breckinridge, you know, and she’s down on football. She thinks she can keep me out of the game by piling on a sonnet, after everything else. Well, she’s cute! I give up. I can’t write a sonnet.”

“Oh, Bobs!” Jacquette stared at him in blank dismay. “You’re captain! You must play in the championship game!”

“Then will you write the sonnet?”

Jacquette stood still and met his honest blue eyes. No one who knew Bobs could help trusting him. As far as she could see, he was not ashamed of having asked the question.

She knew that it was a common thing among the girls to prepare lessons for their boy friends on the team, but, somehow, it had never entered her mind that she could do such a thing. Suddenly the thought that she—Jacquette Willard—might gain or lose Bobs Drake the chance to play in the championship game, took away her breath.

“But it wouldn’t be your work, Bobs,” she uttered, mechanically, while the sweet flattery of the situation tugged at her principles.

“What do I care?” he protested. “I’m not going to write sonnets for a living. I’m going to be an engineer. Oh, I know how you feel about it, because my principles are just the same, but this case is an exception. We wouldn’t be setting a bad example, even, because no one except you and me need ever know. That’s one reason I asked you; I knew you’d never tell.”

They had reached Jacquette’s home while he was speaking, and as she glanced at an upper window, Aunt Sula’s face leaned forward to smile a welcome.

“Oh, Bobs!” Jacquette cried, reproachfully, then, “you said you thought I was square!”

“I do!” he answered, stoutly, and after that they argued for a full half hour, standing there at the foot of the steps in the chill November day.

The end of it was that Bobs went away with several new ideas about the conscience of a girl. Not only that; he had promised to burn the midnight oil, before he slept, over a sonnet which was to be addressed to past football heroes of Marston High, whose ghosts, Jacquette had hinted, might be imagined as haunting the assembly-room where their gloriously-won banners still hung, and where the big mass-meetings were always held.

It would have been far easier for Jacquette to compose that sonnet on the spot, than it had been to keep from doing it, and, as she entered the house she was feeling triumphant over the way she had insisted on Bobs’s working out his own scheme. Then, before she had laid down her books, the bell sounded, and, turning, she saw her cousin Marquis on the threshold. “Come out and walk around the block with me, Jack,” he demanded. “I want to see you alone.”

“All right, Quis,” she answered, happily, stopping to give her white-haired grandfather a hug as he came out of the library to meet her. “Just sit down a minute, please, while I run upstairs to speak to Tia. Then I’ll be À votre service.”

But, instead of accepting her suggestion, Marquis excused himself to his grandfather and went out on the steps, where Jacquette found him a little later, with Clarence Mullen. Marquis had just loaded his own school-books on top of those Clarence already carried, and was giving a list of orders in a tone that a master might use with a slave. “After that,” he was finishing, as Jacquette appeared, “take these books to my house and wait there till I come, no matter how late it is.” Jacquette glanced at Clarence with quick understanding. Far from seeming humiliated, he had an air of new importance as he touched his hat to her and hurried away.

“So he’s pledged Beta Sig, is he?” she asked, with a smile.

Marquis nodded without speaking, as they went down the steps together.

“I’ve a small grudge against that boy, because you deserted Louise and me to walk to school with him one morning,” Jacquette went on, lightly. “He’s been a rival of mine since then. Every time I want to speak to you, he’s right at your heels. I think you have some sort of fascination for him, Quis, the way he follows you around.”

“But of course the fact that he has a special admiration for your cousin doesn’t win him any favour in your eyes,” Quis said, stiffly.

“Of course it does! In fact that’s the only reason I haven’t let myself take a prejudice against him. Why, Quis!”—turning a surprised face to him—“what’s the matter?”

But Marquis met her questioning look coldly. “I suppose you haven’t forgotten that Bobs Drake is an Epsilon Lambda Kappa,” he answered.

There was something irresistibly funny to Jacquette in his solemn way of pronouncing those three Greek letters, especially as the members of Bobs’s fraternity were universally known around school as the “Elks.” In spite of herself, she smiled mischievously as she answered, “No; I haven’t forgotten.”

“Perhaps that doesn’t mean anything to you,” Marquis went on, severely, noting the smile. “I’ve heard, before, that girls had no sense of honour, so probably the fact that the Elks are recognised as good friends of Kappa Delta, always working to land the best girls in that sorority, wouldn’t make any difference to you—a Sigma Pi. Of course, my frat makes it a point to help Sigma Pi, and, naturally, it expects a little appreciation in return, but that’s not my point, now. How do you suppose it made me feel to have the other fellows in the frat house, just now, see you, my own cousin, walk past with a fellow that has treated me the way Bobs Drake has?”

“Quis, what on earth do you mean?”

“I mean that when he was elected captain he put Ned Woodward on the team instead of me, just because I’m a Beta Sig and Ned’s an Elk. Yes, he did! Fraternity prejudice isn’t supposed to rule in the make-up of a football team, but it got in its work that time. Ned’s no better man than I am, and most of the fellows will tell you he isn’t as good. Then Bobs made me his sub. That means I have no chance to play, ever, unless he falls below in his marks or gets hurt in the game. Haven’t you caught on to the fact that the reason I could play in those two games, early in the season, was because Bobs Drake wasn’t above, those weeks? Do you know that a fellow has to play at least two games and a half, in order to win his football emblem? Unless I play another half-game with the team—and there’s precious little hope of it, now—I won’t have a right to wear the letters of my school on my sweater, this year.”

“But Quis——”

“I tell you, Bobs Drake doesn’t intend I shall have that right. He thinks I need taking down because I’ve lived abroad, or some such rot. But he’s hurting himself, all right! Talk about his being the idol of the school! You wouldn’t think so if you could hear the fellows talk, down at the Beta Sig house. They won’t get over his slight to me in a hurry, and, for my part, I never shall. You can choose between Bobs Drake and me, right here and now, Jacquette. You know the facts. Are you going to have anything more to do with him?”

Jacquette hesitated an instant, but that instant was too much for Marquis’s hurt pride. He said something that stung, and she answered back as sharply as she could. They went around the block, not once, but five times, before Jacquette finally rushed into the house and up to Aunt Sula’s room, where she flung herself on the couch in a tempest of tears.

“Oh, Tia, Tia! Quis is dreadfully angry at me!” she sobbed out. “He has said such awful things! He has even accused me of coaching Bobs Drake to keep him above this week, so that he can play in the championship game and keep Quis out!”