ard. His chums, Rob Stanard, Dick Ambler and Jack Preston, were
standing together a few feet apart from the rest. Their faces were very
red and the haranguing seemed to be addressed directly to them. Edgar
stopped where he was, wondering what it was all about, but shy of
joining a crowd over which Nat was presiding.

The speaker's voice rose to a higher key.

"I'll tell you, boys," he was saying, "if you persist in intimacy with
this fellow, you needn't expect to be in with me and my crowd."

"We don't want you and your crowd," was the response. "He's worth all of
you rolled into one."

Edgar's heart stood still. "Was Nat Howard talking about _him_?"

The voice went on: "I grant you the fellow's smart enough and game
enough, but he's not in our class, and I, for one, won't associate with
him intimately."

"His family's one of the oldest and most honorable in the country," said
Robert Stanard. "I've heard my father say so."

"Yes, but his father must have been a black sheep to run away with a
common actress--"

The harangue was brought to an abrupt end. The enraged Edgar had sprung
forward and, with a blow in the face, struck Nat Howard down. Nat's
friends were lifting him up and wiping the blood from his face and
dusting his clothing, while Edgar's own friends gathered around him as
if to restrain him from repeating the attack. He shook them off, gazing
with contempt upon his limp and half-stunned adversary.

"I'll not hit him again until he repeats his offence," he assured the
boys, "but I want him and all other cowardly dogs to know what's waiting
for them when they insult the memory of my father and mother. Yes! my
mother was an actress! God gave her the gifts to make her one and she
had the pluck to use them to earn bread for herself and for her
children. Yes! she was an actress! She had the lovely face and form, the
high intelligence and the poetic soul for the making of a perfect woman
or for the interpreter of genius--for the personification of a Juliet, a
Rosalind or a Cordelia. Yes! she was an actress! And I'm proud of it as
surely as I'm proud she's an angel in Heaven! And I'm proud that my
father--the son of a proud family--had the spirit, for her sweet sake,
to fly in the face of convention, to count family, fortune and all well
lost to become her husband, and to adopt her profession; to learn of
her, in order that he might be always at her side to protect her and to
live in the light of her presen