In the first place the training-table was no more, and he must go back to delivering morning papers.  With foot-ball, with diversions in college and in the country, he had lost much time and he must make that up.  The political turmoil had kept his mind from his books and for a while Marjorie had taken it away from them altogether.  He had come to college none too well prepared, and already John Burnham had given him one kindly warning; but so supreme was his self-confidence that he had smiled at the geologist and to himself.  Now he frowningly wondered if he had not lost his head and made a fool of himself; and a host of worries and suspicions attacked him so sharply and suddenly that, before he knew what he was doing, he had leaped panic-stricken from the fence and at a half-trot was striking back across the fields in a bee-line for his room and his books.  And night and day thereafter he stuck to them.

Meanwhile the struggle was going on at the capital, and by the light of every dawn the boy drank in every detail of it from the morning paper that was literally his daily bread.  Two weeks after the big game, the man from the Pennyroyal was installed as governor.  The picked guard at the arsenal was reinforced.  The contesting autocrat was said to have stored arms in the penitentiary, a gray, high-walled fortress within a stone’s throw of the governor’s mansion, for the Democratic warden thereof was his loyal henchman.  The first rumor of the coming of the mountaineers spread, and the capital began to fill with the ward heelers and bad men of the autocrat.

A week passed, there was no filing of a protest, a pall of suspense hung over the land like a black cloud, and under it there was no more restless spirit than Jason, who had retreated into his own soul as though it were a fortress of his hills.  No more was he seen at any social gathering—­not even at the gymnasium, for the delivery of his morning papers gave him all the exercise that he needed and more.  His hard work and short hours of sleep began to tell on him.  Sometimes the printed page of his book would swim before his eyes and his brain go panic-stricken.  He grew pale, thin, haggard, and worn, and Marjorie saw him only when he was silently, swiftly striding from dormitory to class-room and back again—­grim, reticent, and non-approachable.  When Christmas approached he would not promise to go to Gray’s nor to John Burnham’s, and he rarely went now even to his mother.  In Mavis Hawn, Gray found the same mystifying change, for when the morbidly sensitive spirit of the mountaineer is wounded, healing is slow and cure difficult.  One day, however, each pair met.  Passing the mouth of the lane, Gray saw Mavis walking slowly along it homeward and he rode after her.  She turned when she heard his horse behind her, her chin lifted, and her dark sullen eyes looked into his with a stark, direct simplicity that left him with his lips half open—­confused and speechless.  And gently, at last: