Carroll, after a vacation spent in New York where he had seen all of the plays and dined at the best restaurants and gone to many more dances than were good for his health, returned to the school more than ever dissatisfied and disgruntled with the life he led in it. The talk with Mr. Morris about Tony, the consciousness that they possessed an important secret in common, served a little to make his relations with his house master easier, but he was still unable to give his friendship in the easy way he longed to give it. Neither, to his deepening chagrin and regret, was he making progress in his friendship with Deering, for Tony was more than ever absorbed in the life of his form, and spent all his free time with Wilson and Lawrence. He seemed unconscious of the affection he had won from Carroll and this, with Carroll’s intense consciousness of how completely his affection was going out, served to make their relations anything but free and spontaneous. So far as Tony thought about his room-mate that term it was as of an older fellow with whom he was not very congenial, and of whose laziness and indifferent attitude toward the school he did not approve. He thought Carroll to be wasting his time both at his books and in the school life, in either of which he could have counted immensely. Had Tony been less absorbed in his younger friends, he would probably have found a good deal in Reggie to like and value, as earlier in the year he had begun to feel he should. From his cozy den in the midst of Standerland Hall, surrounded by his well-loved books, his few but carefully chosen pictures, Mr. Morris watched the life throbbing about him with sympathetic insight and keen interest. He was not one of those fortunate schoolmasters who do not allow their profession to engage their affections. Morris, with a surrender that was effectually a sacrifice, for he had gifts and opportunities that might have won him a finer place in the world, gave his life completely to the school. He had loved it as a boy, he had looked back upon it during college with fond recollection and yearning, and after three years or so at a professional school, having taken his examinations for the bar, he had gone back to accept Dr. Forester’s offer of a mastership. For half-a-dozen years he had been there now, and each year the place and the boys got a deeper hold upon his heart and his interest. He was scrupulously fair and evenly kind; therefore deservedly popular; but despite this he had his favorite boys, not usually known as such by the school at large, to whom he gave a special affection and a deeper interest. From the first day, when Deering, with his sparkling eyes and bright, clear-cut, eager face, had come to him for a seat in the schoolroom, he had felt for him that keen attraction which, as he grew to know the boy’s high spirits, lively sense of honor, and sunshiny nature, had deepened to a real affection. In Carroll also he had always felt a special interest,