“I positively must go back.  We have company, and I ran away without saying a word.”

“Anybody I know?” inquired Tom.

“Three somebodies whom you know, or ought to know, very well:  Mr. Duxbury Farley, Mr. Vincent Farley, Miss Eva Farley.”

His eyes darkened suddenly.

“I’d like to know how under the sun they managed to get on your grandfather’s good side!” he grumbled.

Ardea Dabney’s expressive face mirrored dawning displeasure.

“Why do you say that?” she retorted.  “Eva was my classmate for years at Miss De Valle’s.”

He made a boyish face of disapproval, saying bluntly:  “I don’t care if she was.  You shouldn’t make friends of them.  They are not fit for you to wipe your shoes on.”

For the second time since his home-coming, Tom saw the Dabney imperiousness flash out; saw and felt it.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Gordon!  Less than an hour ago, we were speaking of you, and of what happened at Beersheba.  Mr. Farley and his son both stood up for you.”

“And you took the other side, I reckon,” he broke out, quite unreasonably.  It had not as yet come to blows between him and his father’s business associates, but it made him immeasurably dissatisfied to find them on social terms at Deer Trace Manor.

“Perhaps I did, and perhaps I did not,” she answered, matching his tartness.

“Well, you can tell them both that I’m much obliged to them for nothing,” he said, rising and going to the door with her.  “They would be mighty glad to see it patched up again and me back in the Beersheba school.”

“Of course they would; so would all of your friends.”

“But they are not my friends.  They have fooled my father, and they’ll fool your grandfather, if he doesn’t watch out.  But they can’t fool me.”

He had opened the outer door for her, and she drew herself up till she could face him squarely, slate-blue eyes flashing scornfully into sullen gray.

“That is the first downright cowardly thing I have ever known you to say!” she declared.  “And I wish you to know, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Gordon, that Mr. Duxbury Farley and Mr. Vincent Farley and Miss Eva Farley are my guests and my friends!” And with that for her leave-taking, she turned her back on him and went swiftly across the two lawns to the great gray house on the opposite knoll.

For the first fortnight of his mother’s convalescence Tom slept badly, and his days were as the days of the accused whose sentence has been suspended; jail days, these, with chains to clank when he thought of the promise made in the gray Christmas dawn; with whips to flog him when the respite grew shorter and the time drew near when his continued stay at home must be explained to his mother.