With a rapidly sinking heart, a thumping heart which gave him actual pain, John Grandin sat rooted in his chair. He looked up at the broad back and the straining shoulder seams of the khaki shirt. He loved Cliff Hauman. Understanding this fact was not enough, however. He felt he had to declare himself, somehow, some way: the time was now. But he was unable to do anything but wait. His mind touched fleetingly on the first morning of summer school, while he sat here, and ruefully he realized how the new students would be already in the classroom, wondering what had happened to their professor—wondering, even, if they had got the date or the hour wrong and consulting their schedules to find out.

Cliff finally sat down opposite him, but at a considerable distance. For some reason of his own, he had chosen a chair on the far side of the room. As Grandin made conversation to prolong the unhappy happy visit and smoked cigarette after cigarette, Cliff each time sprang to his feet and came rapidly across the room to light it for him; then he would recede at once to his distant chair. The older man noticed how he sat leaning forward, on the very edge of the chair, his elbows on his knees, in the exact position in which he had sat throughout their first meeting on the boat to Nantucket—tense, restless, ill at ease. In spite of his good looks and freshness, with his tawny hair darker with damp but well combed, he was so unlike the natural happy careless fellow of the Sconset holiday that Grandin was keenly struck by the difference. Cliff seemed torn between a restless desire to get up and go, and a kind of worry or unease because, possibly, Grandin might have lost interest in him.

By an unexpected but groundless intuition, John Grandin suddenly got the notion—why, he couldn’t have said—that Cliff Hauman had failed his physical examination in Brooklyn and was hanging on for dear life to anyone who still thought of him as the Marine captain he wanted to be. If this were true, Cliff had no need to worry. John Grandin had by no means lost interest in Cliff: on the contrary, in spite of his knowing better, he felt an all but passionate desire to put his arms around the fellow. But what good would it do him; or Cliff? Such an overt move would most certainly mark the end of their relationship forever. . . .