entirely surrounded by freckles, and his own eyes drooped before their
challenge and contempt. They drooped also as he met the questioning gaze
of his elder brother, Ham, whose seat was just at the door. Ham had a
disquieting capacity for reading Paul's thoughts, and an equally
disquieting scorn of cowardice. But Paul closed the door behind him,
and, in the freedom of the outer air, set his lips to whistling a casual
tune. He could never be for a moment alone without breaking into some
form of music. It was his nature's language and his soul's soliloquy.

Of course tomorrow would bring a reckoning for truancy and a probable
renewal of his danger, but tomorrow is after all another day and for
this afternoon at least he felt safe.

But Ham Burton's uncanny powers of divination were at work, and out of
his seat he slipped unobserved. Through the door he flitted shadow-like
and strolled along in the wake of his younger brother.

Down where the spring crooned softly over its mossy rocks and where
young brook trout darted in phantom flashes, Ham Burton found Paul with
his face tight-clasped in his nervous hands. Back there in the
school-house had been only terror, but out here was something else. A
specter of self-contempt had risen to contend with physical trepidation.
The song of the water and the rustle of the leaves where the breeze
harped among the platinum shafts of the birches were pleading with this
child-dreamer, and in his mind a conflict swept backward and forward.
Paul did not at once see his brother, and the older boy stood over him
in silence, watching the mental fight; watching until he knew that it
was lost and that timidity had overpowered shame. His own eyes at first
held only scorn for such a poltroon attitude, but suddenly there leaped
into them a fierce glow of tenderness, which he as quickly masked. At