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Fitz lured Eve to a far corner and showed her a set of wonderful carved chess-men that he had bought that morning; and photographs of his friends at Eton, and of the school, and of some of the masters. He talked very earnestly and elaborately about these dull matters, and passed by the opportunities which her first embarrassed replies offered for the repartee of youth. And he who was most impatient of restraint and simple occupations talked and behaved like a dull, simple, kindly old gentleman. His method may not have left Eve with a dazzling impression of him; she could not know that he was not himself, but all at once a deliberate artist seeking to soothe and to make easy.

Eve did not enjoy that call; she enjoyed nothing in those days but prayer and despair; but she got to the end of it without any more tears and crashes. And she said to her mother afterward that young Williams seemed a nice boy–but so dull. Well, they were quits. She had seemed dull enough to Fitz. A sick cat may touch your heart, but does not furnish you with lively companionship. Fitz was heartily glad when the Burtons had gone. He had worked very hard to make things possible for that absurd baby camel.

“You may call her an absurd baby camel,” said his mother, “but it’s my opinion that she is going to be a very great beauty.”

“She!” exclaimed Fitz, thinking that the ugliness of Eve might have unhinged his mother’s beauty-loving mind.

“Oh,” said his mother, “she’s at an age now–poor child! But don’t you remember how the bones of her face–“

“I am trying to forget,” said Fitz with a tremendous shudder for the occasion.

IV

Fitz did not take a degree at Oxford. He left in the middle of his last term, leaving many friends behind. He stood well, and had been in no especial difficulty of mischief, and why he left was a mystery. The truth of the matter is that he had been planning for ten years to leave Oxford in the very middle of his last term. For upon that date fell his twenty-first birthday, when he was to be his own man. He spent a few hours in his mother’s house in London. And, of course, she tried to make him go back and finish, and was very much upset, for her. But Fitz was obdurate.

“If it were Yale, or Princeton, or Harvard, or Berkeley, or Squedunk,” he said, “I would stick it out. But a degree from Oxford isn’t worth six weeks of home.”

“But aren’t you going to wait till I can go with you?”

“If you’ll go with me to-night you shall have my state-room, and I’ll sleep on the coal. But if you can’t go till to-morrow, mother mine, I will not wait. I have cabled my father,” said he, “to meet me at quarantine.”

“Your poor, busy father,” she said, “will hardly feel like running on from Cleveland to meet a boy who is coming home without a degree.”

“My father,” said Fitz, “will be at quarantine. He will come out in a tug. And he will arrange to take me off and put me ashore before the others. If the ship is anywhere near on schedule my father and I will be in time to see a ball game at the Polo Grounds.”

Something in the young man’s honest face and voice aroused an answering enthusiasm in his mother’s heart.

“Oh, Fitz,” she said, “if I could possibly manage it I would go with you. Tell your father that I am sailing next week. I won’t cable. Perhaps he’ll be surprised and pleased.”

“I know he will,” said Fitz, and he folded his mother in his arms and rumpled her hair on one side and then on the other.

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