Had he known all that was going on in Tony’s mind and heart, he would have understood. For shut in his bedroom, flat upon his face on the bed, Deering was struggling with the keenest temptation he had ever faced. He realized acutely the opprobrium, the unjust opprobrium, that he would meet with, perhaps not crediting his schoolmates for as much generosity as they had; and though he would not have feared to face the boys had the fault been his own, he could not trust himself yet to meet them, see their disappointment in him, receive their tolerant sympathy, when he knew that a word from him might free himself from ignominy and cast the blame where it belonged. And as he lay there, great waves of hate for Chapin swept over him. He clenched his fists and drove them into the pillows, longing that his fingers were about Chapin’s throat and that he might choke out of him a confession of his dastardly betrayal. To his overwrought mind his future in the school looked dark and unattractive. The two months that he had spent there had been so bright and happy; he had made such warm friends and won for himself, it seemed, such a promising place in the regard of the school; and now, he felt, all must change, and his fool’s paradise go tumbling down. To have been given his chance, and failed through the willful meanness of another, and failing, to have cost his school the victory! For a moment he felt that he would pack his trunk, go down and tell Stenton the truth, and then take the first train out of Monday Port and leave the school to settle the wrangle how it would. And then he remembered his grandfather’s parting words, as the old general had stood in the portico of the white-pillar’d house on the far-away bayou, “Never repay a meanness by a meanness, my boy; and you will make a good sort of Christian.” And now, would not telling, truth though it were, be repaying a meanness by a meanness? Yes; but with the acknowledgment, wrung from his conscience, he burst into tears, tears of helpless disappointment and chagrin. Telling on another, especially in his own defense, Tony had always instinctively felt the most exquisite form of meanness.