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The first two weeks of December were busy, for which Jock was thankful, because they left him little time for thinking and remembering. He wished that he need not think at all; that he might make his mind a blank until such day as Yvonne should return from California and tell him the truth. Plenty of time then to cogitate matters. No use to try to do it now, when all one's suspicions were based on a single line of newspaper type that might possibly prove to be only coincidence, after all.

Numerous activities connived to keep him occupied. For one thing, he suddenly stared wild-eyed into the face of the fact that he had done almost no studying during the term. Midyear exams loomed, a distinct and not far-distant menace. He turned to his subjects and began to absorb them with an avidity that incited Bones to lofty scorn. He took to listening in classes where he had previously only dreamed, and the fly-leaves of his textbooks knew his idly-scrawling pencil no longer.

For another thing, there was "practice." This meant that day after day Jock with his banjo and numerous comrades with instruments of divers sorts sat in informal attitudes around a great barren platform, while before them a frenzied youth in spectacles beat time, and tore his hair, and howled, "Come on, you saxes! What's the matter with the second violin? Louder, louder! Softer! Slower! Hey, get into the spirit of this thing, will you, fellows? Quit syncopating, over there—this is one tune that's got to be played as is. Oh, rotten! Lousy. We'll get hissed off the stage—" "We" was the University