Tony had been separated a great deal from his family since he had gone north to school, so that, after the first homesickness for Deal was over, he began to be deeply interested again in the old scenes and familiar friends of his early boyhood: the easy-going, ill-managed old plantation with its extensive sugar industry bringing in such income as they had; the little hill on which stood the house of Low Deering, low, white and great galleried; the sleepy bayou that stretched away below to the wild and beautiful jungle, a marshy live-oak forest, picturesquely hung with the heavy lace of the gray Spanish moss and the delicate purple of the wild wistaria; the inky black darkies, relics of ante-bellum days; the few families of similar decaying plantations in the neighborhood. Later in the summer at Bald Rock in North Carolina, at the hotel to which their diminutive cottage was attached, there were young people again—boys to play baseball and climb the near by mountains with, girls with whom to dance at the Saturday night hops on the great gallery of the hotel. Then too there was his father. Despite an inner disapproval that Tony could not help feeling for his father’s irresponsible doings, for the trouble he now and then brought so deeply, perhaps unwittingly, upon them all, Tony enjoyed his father immensely. If he himself had inherited his strong sense of honor and his manly grip on life from his grandfather, and the inner patient tenderness we have sometimes noted in him from his mother, it was from his father that his charm, his quick and ready sympathy, his genial grace had come. After the terrible six months he had given them, Victor Deering could not have done more to atone than he was whole-heartedly trying to do. It was characteristic of him, for he deeply appreciated what Deal School had done for Tony, that his repentance should have caused him to suggest to the old general that his own patrimony, hoarded by the head of the house against a rainy day, should be made over to Tony at once, and the income, the capital if necessary, be applied to completing his education at Deal and later on at Kingsbridge. General Deering took his son at his word. Victor was only too eager to promise from then on steadfast attention to the plantation, which, better managed, was capable still of recouping their fortunes and furnishing them with a living. So it began to look bright, as Tony wrote to Jimmie Lawrence, for his return to school, and without any question of taking advantage of scholarships or such aid as the Head had so kindly offered. That offer rankled, unjustly as he knew, in the old aristocrat’s mind. He was determined Tony should have no such humiliation to face. Of the school in these days of Tony’s enforced exile, a glimpse shall be had through the medium of Jimmie Lawrence’s letters, for, of course, the two boys had written each other with some regularity. “DEAL SCHOOL: _May 10th_. “DEAR TONY: