Bertie sat down suddenly and shrieked. Jeems rolled over and over,
clutching small feathers from the mattress in the agony of his delight,
while the clothed youths contented themselves with amused but gurgling
chuckles.

"Bennie, my boy," gasped Jeems, at last, "you'll be the death of me! O
Lord! O Lord! You unfortunate infant! You shall come here and have a
drum to pound; yes, you shall." He tottered weakly to his feet. "Come,
Bertie, let us go get dressed."

The two disappeared into the bedroom, leaving de Laney uncomfortably
alone with the occupants of the window ledge.

The young fellow walked awkwardly across the room and sat down on a
partly empty chair, not because he preferred sitting to standing, but
in order to give himself time to recover from his embarrassment.

The sort of chaffing to which he had just been subjected was direct and
brutal; it touched all his tender spots--the very spots wherein he
realized the intensest soreness of his deficiencies, and about which,
therefore, he was the most sensitive--yet, somehow, he liked it. This
was because the Leslie boys meant to him everything free and young that
he had missed in the precise atmosphere of his own home, and so he
admired them and stood in delightful inferiority to them in spite of
his wealth and position. He would have given anything he owned to have
felt himself one of their sort; but, failing that, the next best thing
was to possess their intimacy. Of this intimacy chaffing was a gauge.
Bennington Clarence de Laney always glowed at heart when they rubbed
his fur the wrong way, for it showed that they felt they knew him well
enough to do so. And in this there was something just a little