believed you,” he added hurriedly, “but you’re the nervous type, you know, and I thought maybe
your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont. I thought he might not be quite as
mixed up as you made out.” Finny’s face tried to prepare me for what came next. “Then I saw
him myself.”
I turned incredulously. “You saw Leper?”
“I saw him here this morning, after chapel. He was—well, there’s nothing inflamed about my
imagination and I saw Leper hiding in the shrubbery next to the chapel. I slipped out the side
door the way I always do—to miss the rush—and I saw Leper and he must have seen me. He
didn’t say a damn word. He looked at me like I was a gorilla or something and then he ducked
into Mr. Carhart’s office.”
“He must be crazy,” I said automatically, and then my eyes involuntarily met Finny’s. We both
broke into sudden laughter.
“We can’t do a damn thing about it,” he said ruefully.
“I don’t want to see him,” I muttered. Then, trying to be more responsible, “Who else knows
he’s here.”
“No one, I would think.”
“There’s nothing for us to do, maybe Carhart or Dr. Stanpole can do something. We won’t tell
anybody about it because ... because they would just scare Leper, and he would scare them.”
“Anyway,” said Finny, “then I knew there was a real war on.”
“Yes, I guess it’s a real war all right. But I liked yours a lot better.”
“So did I.”
“I wish you hadn’t found out. What did you have to find out for!” We started to laugh again,
with a half-guilty exchange of glances, in the way that two people who had gone on a gigantic
binge when they were last together would laugh when they met again at the parson’s tea. “Well,”
he said, “you did a beautiful job in the Olympics.”
“And you were the greatest news analyst who ever lived.”
“Do you realize you won every gold medal in every Olympic event? No one’s ever done
anything like that in history.”
“And you scooped every newspaper in the world on every story.” The sun was doing antics
among the million specks of dust hanging between us and casting a brilliant, unstable pool of
light on the floor. “No one’s ever done anything like that before.”