f it, too, over the Fourth. Where have you been?"

Dave told him. "We had a dandy time, too," he added.

"It must have been fine." Nat gave a sigh. "I wish I had been--but
what's the use? You fellows wouldn't care for me."

"What were you going to say, Nat?"

"I might have been there myself, if I hadn't--well, if I hadn't made a
big fool of myself!" burst out the money-lender's son. "Yes, that's what
I did, made a fool of myself! Uncle Tom told me the plain truth."

"I thought you said you'd been visiting an aunt."

"So I have, but she's married again,--married a man named Tom Allen, a
merchant. He knows father, and he flocked it into the old man in great
shape," and Nat actually chuckled. "Told me just what kind of a man dad
was--hard-fisted and miserly--somebody nobody loved or wanted to
associate with. And he warned me not to grow up the same way--not to
think money was everything, and all that. He said a boy ought to be
known for his real worth, not his dollars and his clothes."

"He's right there, Nat."

"Yes, he opened my eyes. And when he asked me about Oak Hall, and you
fellows, and how I had missed passing, he told me the truth about
myself. I--well, I resented it at first, but by and by I got to thinking
he must be right, and the more I thought of it, the more I made up my
mind that I had been a big fool. And then I made a resolve----" Nat
stopped and gave a gulp.

"A resolve?"

"Yes. I resolved that, the first time I met you, Dave, and the others, I
was going to eat humble pie and tell you just what I thought of myself."
The son of the money-lender was in a perspiration now and mopped his
face with his handkerchief.

Dave hardly knew how to reply. Here was Nat Poole in certainly an
entirely new role.

"I am glad to know you are going to turn over a new leaf," he returned.
"I hope you make a success of it."

"Do you really, Dave?" There was an eager note in Nat's voice.

"Sure I do, Nat. You'd be all right, if--if----"

"Go ahead, give it to me straight, just as Uncle Tom did."

"Well, if you wouldn't be quite so conceited and stuck-up, and if you'd
buckle down a bit more to studying."

"That's what I am going to do--buckle down to study next fall. And if I
show any conceit in the future, well, I want you and Ben Basswood, and
Roger and Phil, and all the others, to knock it right out of me," went
on the money-lender's son, earnestly. "My eyes are open and I'm going
ahead, and I don't want