“Nor I. Now go to bed, it is late.  She is a bit of a tease, John.  Mark Rivers says she is now just one half of the riddle called woman.”

John understood well enough that he was some day expected by his uncle to have it out with Tom.  He got two other bits of advice on this matter.  The rector detained him after school, a few days later.  “How goes the swimming, John?” he asked.

The Squire early in the summer had taken this matter in hand, and as Ann Penhallow said, with the West Point methods of kill or cure.  John replied to the rector that he was now given leave to swim with the Westways boys.  The pool was an old river-channel, now closed above, and making a quiet deep pool such as in England is called a “backwater” and in Canada a “bogan.”  The only access was through the Penhallow grounds, but this was never denied.

“Does Tom McGregor swim there?” asked Rivers.

“Yes, and the other boys.  It is great fun now; it was not at first.”

“About Tom, John.  I hope you have made friends with him.”

Said John, with something of his former grown-up manner, “It appears to me that we never were friends.  I regret, sir, that it seems to you desirable.”

“But, John, it is.  For two Christian lads like you to keep up a quarrel—­”

“He’s a heathen, sir.  I told him yesterday that he ought to apologize to Leila.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, he guessed I wanted another licking.  That’s the kind of Christian he is.”

“I must speak to him.”

“Oh, please not to do that!  He will think I am afraid.”  Here were the Squire and Rivers on two sides of this question.

“Are you afraid, John?  You were once frank with me about it.”

“I do not think, Mr. Rivers, you ought to ask me that.”  He drew up his figure as he spoke.

The rector would have liked to have whistled—­a rare habit with him when alone and not in one of his moods of depression.  He said, “I beg your pardon, John,” and felt that he had not only done no good, but had made a mistake.

John said, “I am greatly obliged, sir.”  When half-way home he went back and met Rivers at his gate.

“Well,” said the rector, “left anything?”

“No, sir,” said the boy, his young figure stiffening, his head up.  “I wasn’t honest, sir.”  And again with his old half-lost formal way, “I—­I—­you might have thought—­I wasn’t—­quite honourable.  I mean—­I’ll never be able to forgive that blackguard until I can—­can get even with him.  You see, sir?”

“Yes, I see,” said Rivers, who did not see, or know for a moment what to say.  “Well, think it over, John.  He is more a rough cub than a blackguard.  Think it over.”

“Yes, sir,” and John walked away.

The rector looked after the boy thinking—­he’s the Squire all over, with more imagination, a gentleman to the core.  But how wonderfully changed, and in only eight months.