“Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!… The craziest man I ever saw!” He stopped suddenly and, looking down at the boy for a moment with this same expression of haggard, over-driven restlessness, demanded impatiently:
“What have you been doing by yourself all night? Just sitting there all alone and doing nothing?… I’ll swear, I don’t see how you do it!… I’d go crazy sitting in one place like that without any one to talk to!” he said in an accusing and impatient tone of voice, as if the other youth had really done some extraordinary and unreasonable thing. He thrust one hand quickly and impatiently into the trousers pocket of his well-cut clothes in such a way that his Delta Kappa Epsilon pin was for a moment visible. Then he stood there, jingling some coins about in his pocket and looking at the boy with his inflamed, restless, furiously desperate eyes. Turning away suddenly, with a movement of impatience, he shook his head in a gesture of astounded disbelief, laughed his little hoarse falsetto laugh again, and said:
“It beats me!… Don’t see how he does it!… Damnedest man I ever saw!… It’d drive me crazy to be alone like that!”
He turned abruptly again, thrust both hands into his pockets, and for a moment stood looking at the boy with the old expression of mock gravity, and with a faintly malicious smile hovering about the edges of his thin, nervous, strongly modelled mouth.
“Do you know what they’re saying about you at home?… Do you know what those people think of you?… Do you know what all those old women up there are doing now?” he said hoarsely and accusingly, in his deep, sonorous, and rapid tone.
“Now, Robert!” the boy suddenly shouted, in a choking and furious tone, getting to his feet. “Don’t you start that stuff! I’m not going to listen to it! You can’t fool me! They’re not saying anything!”
Robert lifted his thin, finely drawn face and laughed again, his little annoying hoarse falsetto laugh, in which a note of malice and triumph was audible.
“Why, they are!” he said solemnly. “It’s the truth!… I think you ought to know about it!… I heard it everywhere, all over town!”
“Oh, Robert, you’re a liar!” the boy cried furiously. “What did you hear all over town? You heard nothing!”
“Why, I did!” said Robert solemnly, as before. “I’ll swear it to you…. Do you know what I heard the other day?” he went on in a blunt, accusing tone. “I heard that one of those women up there—some old sister in the Baptist
