“I know,” Larry countered quickly, “but I’ve worked in a shop long enough to know that a lot of things that ought to go to the man higher up never get there. We had a foreman who was always jumping on the men for kicking about bad safety appliances. I don’t believe he ever reported half of ’em to anybody who had the authority to order them fixed.” It was just here that the real miracle began to show itself, like the face of the sun crawling out of the shadow of a total eclipse. Though he hardly realized it, and would, perhaps, have refused to admit it, the college year, so different from the year in which he had worked and failed, had planted a lot of new things in Charles Purdick. The timely help that had come at a moment when he was so sick and discouraged that it seemed as if he must give up the fight for an education; the way in which Larry had stood by him; the frank and helpful friendship of such “rotten rich” fellows as Dick Maxwell, Wally Dixon, Cal Rogers and Ollie McKnight; recollections of all these “mollifications,” if you could call them so, came crowding in when the old class-and-mass hatred tried to get in its word. And in the end it was the “mollifications” that won out――at least, in the matter of Ollie McKnight’s generous gift. “I――I guess I can’t go back on Ollie, after all,” he admitted, finally. “I was savage at first――when his sister told me. I kept telling myself that I’d work my fingers to the bone to pay that money back, and that I’d starve before I’d use another penny of it. I――I guess that was just plain, low-down meanness in me, Larry.” “Now you’re talking like a sure-enough man!” said Larry, chuckling as delightedly over the victory as he would if he had stood in Ollie McKnight’s shoes. “Let’s call it a locked door, and if I were you, I’d never let Ollie know that his little scheme for keeping the thing dark has gone blooey. Seems to me that’s the whitest thing to do.” “You’re right; you’re mighty nearly always right, Larry,” said Purdick, jumping up to help Larry get his trunk out of the closet. “Now if I were only sure of getting a job this summer――” “What did you have in mind?” queried Larry, as craftily as if he were trying to trap somebody into betraying a secret. “It’s the big city and a hot office for mine,” said Purdick, as Larry began to throw his clothes pell mell into the open trunk. “Bet you a dollar you never see the inside of an office this whole summer,” was the joshing reply. “I wish I didn’t have to. But that’s where I’ll land. I’m not husky enough for anything else, unless it’s slinging dishes in a restaurant, or something like that.” “Well,” Larry went on in the same sort of triumphant joshing tone, “I’ll bet you another dollar that you _do_ sling dishes this summer, a part of the time――only they’ll be tin ones. Take me up?” “I don’t know what you’re driving at,” said little Purdick; and he didn’t.