casually, looking away “—I meant what I said yesterday—about that house, the gatekeeper’s lodge, I mean—If you like the place, and think you’d care to live there, or come up whenever you feel like it, I wish you’d take it,” he whispered. “I really do—It’s no use to anyone the way it stands, and we’d all be delighted if you’d come and live in it…. Just let me know when you are coming, just say the word, and I’ll have everything ready for you—And we wish you would,” he whispered earnestly, with his radiant smile, as if asking the other youth to do him a favour—“it would be swell.”
“It’s—it’s pretty fine of you, Joel, too—”
“All right, sir,” Joel whispered quickly, hastily, with a smile, avoiding skilfully the embarrassment of thanks: “And look, Eugene—of course I’ll see you Tuesday when I get back to town—I’ll be right there at the hotel the rest of the summer—except for week-ends when I come up here—but I wanted to ask you if you had made up your mind yet about going to Europe?”
“Yes, I have, Joel. At least, that’s what I want to do—what I’d like to do. If I can manage it, I intend to set sail—” the two words had a glorious magic sound to him, and his pulse beat hot and hard with joy and hope as he spoke them—“to set sail in September when my work at the university is over!”
“Gosh! That’s swell!” Joel whispered enthusiastically, his face lighting with radiant eagerness as if the news had given him some great and unexpected happiness—“And Frank Starwick will be glad go hear it, too. You know, he’s going over at the end of August; I had a letter from him just the other day.”
“Yes, I know: he wrote me too.”
“And he’ll want to see you when he comes to town: we must all try to get together before he goes…. And look,” he said quickly, abruptly, casually again—“if you go, how long will you be gone? How long do you intend to stay away?”
“I don’t know, Joel. I’d like to go for a whole year, but I don’t know if I can manage it. They’ve offered me an appointment for another year at the university. They want me to come back for the new term that begins in February, and maybe that’s what I’ll have to do. But I’d like to stay away a year!”
“I hope you can,” Joel whispered. “You ought to spend a whole year over there! It would be a swell thing if you could.”
“Yes; I think so, too. But I don’t know how I’m going to manage it: at
