Of the elder Doane he knew by hearsay—­a proud, intolerant wholly worldly man whose passions, aside from finance, were his son and Baliol aquatics.  And Jane Bostwick’s father he had known as a boy—­a soft-footed, sly-faced velvety sort of a man noted for converting back lots into oil-fields and ash-dumps into mines yielding precious metals.  Jim Deacon was not so old that he had come to philosophy concerning the way of the world.

But so far as his immediate world was concerned, Junior Doane was going out of the varsity boat in the morning—­and he, Jim Deacon, was going to sit in his place.

It came the next morning.  When the oarsmen went down to the boathouse to dress for their morning row, the arrangement of the various crews posted on the bulletin-board gave Deacon the seat at stroke in the varsity boat; Junior Doane’s name appeared at stroke in the second varsity list.

There had been rumours of some sort of a shift, but no one seemed to have considered the probability of Doane’s losing his seat—­Doane least of all.  For a moment the boy stood rigid, looking up at the bulletin-board.  Then suddenly he laughed.

“All right, Carry,” he said, turning to the captain of the second varsity.  “Come on; we’ll show ’em what a rudder looks like.”

But it was not to be.  In three consecutive dashes of a mile each, the varsity boat moved with such speed as it had not shown all season.  There was life in the boat.  Deacon, rowing in perfect form, passed the stroke up forward with a kick and a bite, handling his oar with a precision that made the eye of the coach glisten.  And when the nervous little coxswain called for a rousing ten strokes, the shell seemed fairly to lift out of the water.

In the last mile dash Dr. Nicholls surreptitiously took his stop-watch from his pocket and timed the sprint.  When he replaced the timepiece, the lines of care which had seamed his face for the past few days vanished.

“All right, boys.  Paddle in.  Day after to-morrow we’ll hold the final time-trial.  Deacon, be careful; occasionally you clip your stroke at the finish.”

But Deacon didn’t mind the admonition.  He knew the coach’s policy of not letting a man think he was too good.

“You certainly bucked up that crew to-day, Deacon.”  Jim Deacon, who had been lying at full length on the turf at the top of the bluff watching the shadows creep over the purpling waters of the river, looked up to see Doane standing over him.  His first emotion was one of triumph.  Doane, the son of Cephas Doane, his father’s employer, had definitely noticed him at last.  Then the dominant emotion came—­one of sympathy.

“Well, the second crew moved better too.”

“Oh, I worked like a dog.”  Doane laughed.  “Of course you know I’m going to get my place back, if I can.”

“Of course.”  Deacon plucked a blade of grass and placed it in his mouth.  There was rather a constrained silence for a moment.