“He is too kind,” he observed as he handed back the letter.  “I didn’t do much out there, precious little in fact but what I was told to do.  I figured it out that we young ones were the privates and it was up to us to take orders from the captains who knew their business better than we did and get busy.  I worked on that basis.”

“Sound basis.  I am not afraid that a man who can obey well won’t be able to command well when the time comes.  It isn’t a small thing to be recognized as a true Holiday, either.  It is something to be proud of.”

“I am proud, Uncle Phil.  There is nothing I would rather hear—­and deserve.  But, if I am anywhere near the Holiday standard, it is you mostly that brought me up to it.  I don’t mean any dispraise of Dad.  He was fine and I am proud to be his son.  But he never understood me.  I didn’t have enough dash and go to me for him.  Ted and Tony are both more his kind, though I don’t believe either of them loved him as I did.  But you seemed to understand always.  You helped me to believe in myself.  It was the best thing that could have happened to me, coming to you when I did.”

Larry turned to the mantel and picked up a photograph of himself which stood there, a lad of fifteen or so, facing the world with grave, sensitive eyes, the Larry he had been when he came to the House on the Hill.  He smiled at his uncle over the boy’s picture.

“You burned out the plague spots, too, with a mighty hot iron, some of them,” he added.  “I’ll never forget your sitting there in that very chair telling me I was a lazy, selfish snob and that, all things considered, I didn’t measure up for a nickel with Dick.  Jerusalem!  I wonder if you knew how that hit.  I had a fairly good opinion of Larry Holiday in some ways and you rather knocked the spots out of it, comparing me to my disadvantage with a circus runaway.”

He replaced the picture, the smile still lingering on his face.

“It was the right medicine though.  I needed it.  I can see that now.  Speaking of doses I wish you would make Ted tutor this summer.  I don’t know whether he has told you.  I rather think not.  But he flunked so many courses he will have to drop back a year unless he makes up the work and takes examinations in the fall.”

The senior doctor drummed thoughtfully on the desk.  So that was what the boy had on his mind.

“Why not speak to him yourself?” he asked after a minute.

“And be sent to warm regions as I was last spring when I ventured to give his lord highmightiness some advice.  No good, Uncle Phil.  He won’t listen to me.  He just gets mad and swings off in the other direction.  I don’t handle him right.  Haven’t your patience and tact.  I wonder if he ever will get any sense into his head.  He is the best hearted kid in the world, and I’m crazy over him, but he does rile me to the limit with his fifty-seven varieties of foolness.”

CHAPTER IX