“I might, at that,” murmured Dick.  “But you did not hear the rest of my proposition.  And then—­I shall read you a story—­a story that I wrote myself.”

“Dick!” Tony nearly upset her glass of iced tea in her amazement at this unexpected announcement.  “You don’t mean you have really and truly written a story!”

“Honest to goodness—­such as it is.  Please to remember it is my maiden effort and make a margin of allowance.  But I want your criticism, too—­all the benefit of your superior academic training.”

“Superior academic bosh!” scoffed Tony.  “I’ll bet it is a corking story,” she added unacademically.  “Come on.  Let’s go, quick.  I can’t wait to hear it.”

Nothing loath to get away speedily before the newsboys began to cry the accident through the streets, Dick escorted his pretty companion back to the campus and on to Paradise, at which point they took a canoe and, finally selecting a shady point under an over-reaching sycamore tree, drifted in to shore where Tony leaned against the cushions, tilted her parasol as specified at the angle which forbade any but Dick to see her charming, expressive young face and commanded him to “shoot.”

Dick shot.  Tony listened intently, watching his face as he read, feeling as if this were a new Dick—­a Dick she did not know at all, albeit a most interesting person.

“Why Dick Carson!” she exclaimed when he finished.  “It is great—­a real story with real laughter and tears in it.  I love it.  It is so—­so human.”

The author flushed and fidgeted and protested that it wasn’t much—­just a sketch done from life with a very little dressing up and polishing down.

“I have a lot more of them in my head, though,” he added.  “And I’m going to grind them out as soon as I get time.  I wish I had a bigger vocabulary and knew more about the technical end of the writing game.  I am going to learn, though—­going to take some night work at the University next fall.  Maybe I’ll catch up a little yet if I keep pegging away.”

“Catch up!  Dick, you make me so ashamed.  Here Larry and Ted and I have had everything done for us all our lives and we’ve slipped along with the current, following the line of least resistance.  And you have had everything to contend with and you are way ahead of the rest of us already.  But why didn’t you tell me before about the story?  I think you might have, Dicky.  You know I would be interested,” reproachfully.

“I—­I wasn’t talking much about it to anybody till I knew it was any good.  But I—­just took a notion to read it to you to-day.  That’s all.”

It wasn’t all, but he wanted Tony to think it was.  Not for anything would he have betrayed how reading the story was a desperate expedient to keep her diverted and safe from news of the disaster on the Overland.

He escorted Tony back to the campus house at the latest possible moment and Carlotta, in the secret, pretended to upbraid her roommate for her tardiness and flew about helping her to get dressed, talking continuously the while and keeping a sharp eye on the door lest some intruder burst in and say the very thing Tony Holiday must not be permitted to hear.  It would be so ridiculously easy for somebody to ask, “Oh, did you hear about the awful wreck on the Overland?” and then the fat would be in the fire.