“I wish you would. What are you doing this evening after supper? Couldn’t you drop down and see me for a while? There’ll be one or two other fellows there, probably. We have a sort of a club on Friday nights. Just to talk things over, you know, and exchange ideas. Perhaps you may know the others; if not you’ll want to. Better drop in for a while, Burtis.” “Thank you, sir, I’d like to very much,” replied Kendall gratefully. And yet when the time came he felt rather shy about it and it was nearly eight when he finally descended the stairs and knocked at the door of Mr. Collins’s study. It was the Assistant Principal’s voice that bade him enter. The room was very comfortable and homelike. The walls were lined with bookshelves, there were many easy-chairs, most of them turned toward the hearth where the tiniest of soft coal fires was burning, and the light was supplied by a squatty lamp on the big table so shaded that the upper part of the room was left in a mellow twilight. Mr. Collins’s “one or two other fellows” were in reality five. As Kendall was introduced to them they stood up and their faces were blurred in the pleasant gloom. But two faces he recognized. One belonged to Arthur Thompson and the other to Cowles, the manager of the Football Team. The remaining three boys, all First Class fellows, were Tooker, Sanford and Abercrombie. Tooker was short and round and smiling; Sanford, tall, dark and earnest, and wore tortoise-shell spectacles which gave him the appearance of a benignant owl; Abercrombie was a small chap with light hair and a high-pitched voice whose somewhat buttonish nose was straddled by a pair of glasses which were forever dropping off when he talked and being dragged back at the end of a length of black silk cord. Everyone seemed very affable and gracious; those within reach shook hands with a hearty grip. Cowles recalled the fact that Kendall had come out for football and mentioned it, asking in the next breath why he had deserted them. Luckily Kendall was spared an answer to this as the tall and earnest Sanford was remarking that he had once known a chap named Burtis in New York. “Maybe a relative of yours?” he queried. Kendall, taking the deep chair pushed forward by the host, expressed his doubts of that. “An odd name, though, if you don’t mind my saying so,” continued Teller Sanford. “One doesn’t encounter it often, I think.” “Probably an accident,” remarked Ned Tooker. “The name was Curtis, do you see, and the printer got mixed and set up a B for a C. Simple enough. Merely a typographical error.” “It’s no funnier than your name, Ned,” observed Arthur Thompson. “I suppose, by the same token, your name was once Hooker?” “No,” replied Ned gravely, “it was formerly Ted Nooker, but owing to an unfortunate habit of mine――” Everyone laughed, and Kendall, without knowing what at, found himself laughing with the rest. Ned waited gravely and continued: