He shook his head slowly, while upon his face the faintly indicated modellings of a grin hinted of an inner laughter at some surreptitious thought. "Well, you know, Fred says himself sometimes, I don't seem to be much of a talker exactly!"
"I know. But don't you see? That sort of thing is contagious.
Others will think they ought to go if he does; he's popular and quite a leader. Can't you do anything with him?"
She waited for him to answer. "Can't you?" she insisted.
The grin had disappeared, and Ramsey grew red again. He seemed to wish to speak, to heave with speech that declined to be spoken and would not rouse up from his inwards. Finally he uttered words.
"I--I--well, I--"
"Oh, I know," she said. "A man--or a boy!--always hates to be intruding his own convictions upon other men, especially in a case like this, where he might be afraid of some idiot's thinking him unmanlike. But Ramsey--" Suddenly she broke off and looked at him attentively; his discomfort had become so obvious that suspicion struck her. She spoke sharply. "Ramsey ~you~ aren't dreaming of doing such a thing, are you?"
"What such a thing?"
"Fred hasn't influenced ~you~, has he? You aren't planning to go with him, are you?"
"Where?"
"To join the Canadian aviation."
"No; I hadn't thought of doing it."
She sighed again, relieved. "I had a queer feeling about you just then--that you ~were~ thinking of doing some such thing. You looked so odd--and you're always so quiet, anybody might not really know what you do think. But I'm not wrong about you, am I, Ramsey?"
They had come to the foot of the steps that led up to the entrance of her dormitory, and their walk was at an end. As they stopped and faced each other, she looked at him earnestly; but he did not meet the scrutiny, his eyelids fell.
"I'm not wrong, am I, Ramsey?"
"About what?" he murmured, uncomfortably.
"You are my friend, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"Then it's all right," she said. "That relieves me and makes me happier than I was just now, for of course if you're my friend you wouldn't let me make any mistake about you. I believe you, and now, just before I go in and we won't see much of each other for a week --if you still want me to go with you again next Sunday--"
"Yes--won't you, please?"
"Yes, if you like. But I want to tell you now that I count on you in all this, even though you don't 'talk much,' as you say; I count on you more than I do on anybody else, and I trust you when you say you're my friend, and it makes me happy. And I think perhaps you're right about Fred Mitchell. Talk isn't everything, nobody knows that better than I, who talk so much! and I think that, instead of talking to Fred, a steady, quiet influence like yours would do more good than any amount of arguing. So I trust you, you see? And I'm sorry I had that queer doubt of you." She held out her hand. "Unless I happen to see you on the campus for a minute, in the meantime, it's good-bye until a week from to-day. So--well, so, good-bye until then!"
"Wait," said Ramsey.
"What is it?"
He made a great struggle. "I'm not influencing Fred not to go," he said. "I--don't want you to trust me to do anything like that."
"What?"
"I think it's all right for him to go, if he wants to," Ramsey said, miserably.
"You do? For him to go to ~fight?~"
He swallowed. "Yes."
"~Oh!~" she cried, turned even redder than he, and ran up the stone steps. But before the storm doors closed upon her she looked down to where he stood, with his eyes still lowered, a lonely-seeming figure, upon the pavement below. Her voice caught upon a sob as she spoke.
"If you feel like that, you might as well go and enlist, yourself," she said, bitterly. "I can't--I couldn't--speak to you again after this!"
