"Don't stop," he shouted, when the song had mounted to its close. "Let's have it all over again."
So they had it all over again, the one in his wordless, mumbled tenor, and the other singing in his heart.
During the next week or ten days Tom worried over Tad Whitelaw. He wondered whether or not he ought to go to see the boy. If he didn't, Tad's Harvard career might end suddenly. If he did, he would probably have humiliation for his pains. He wouldn't mind the humiliation if he could do any good; but would he?
One thing that he could do was to take himself to task for thinking about the fellow in one way or the other. It was the fight he put up from day to day. What was Tad Whitelaw to him? Nothing! And yet he was much. It was beyond reasoning about.
He was a responsibility, a care. Tom couldn't help caring; he couldn't help feeling responsible. If Tad went to the bad something in himself would have gone to the bad. He might argue against this instinct every minute of the day, yet he couldn't argue it down.
He remembered that Tad went often to see Hildred. He had been on his way to see her that afternoon before Christmas when they had met on the esplanade. She might be able to get at him more easily than anybody else. He rang her up.
Her life as a débutante was so crowded that she found it hard to give him a half hour. "I'm dead beat," she confessed on the wire. "If it weren't for mother I'd call it all off." She made him a suggestion. She was driving that morning to lunch with a girl who lived in one of the big places beyond Jamaica Pond. If he could be at a certain corner she could pick him up. He could drive out with her, and come back by the trolley car. Then they could talk. That this proposal didn't meet the wishes of some one near the telephone he could judge by the aside which also passed over the wire. "He wants to see me about Tad, mother. I can't possibly refuse."
Getting into the car beside her, he had another of those impressions, now beginning to be rare, of the difference between her way of living and all that he was used to. Much as he knew about cars, it was the first time he had actually driven in a rich woman's limousine. The ease of motion, the cushioned softness, the beaver rug, the blue-book, the little feminine appointments, the sprig of artificial flowers, subdued him so that he once more found it hard to believe that she took him on a footing of equality.