As Middleton was passing from the room he occupied, to the hall, he came on Blair. She was seated in a window, almost behind the curtain and he would have passed by without seeing her but for a movement she made to screen herself entirely. Curiosity and mischief prompted the young man to go up and peep at her. She had a book in her hand, which she held down as if to keep out of sight, and as he looked at her he thought she had been crying. A glance at the book showed it was “Virgil,” and Middleton supposed, from some personal experience, that the tears were connected with the book. So he offered to construe her lesson for her. She let him do it, and he was just congratulating himself that he was doing it tolerably well when she corrected him. At the same moment Jacquelin came in. He too looked unusually downcast, and Blair turned away her face, and then suddenly sprang up and ran away. “What’s the matter?” asked Middleton. “Can’t she read her lesson?” “No: she can read that well enough. You just ought to hear her read Latin. I wish I could do it as well as she does, that’s all! I’d make old Eliphalet open his eyes. She’s crying because I’ve got to go back to school—I wish I were grown up, I bet I wouldn’t go to school any more! I hate school, and I hate old Eliphalet, and I hate old Maule—no, I don’t quite hate him; but I hate school and I’m going to paint his horse blue, if he licks the life out of me.” After which explosion the youngster appeared relieved, and went off to prepare for the inevitable. When he rode away with Doan behind him, his last call back was to Middleton, to be sure and remember his promise to come back again, and to bring Reely Thurston with him. CHAPTER III THE VISITORS START SOUTH AGAIN; AND THEIR FORMER HOSTS GO TO MEET THEM Both Larry Middleton and Mr. Welch were to visit Red Rock again; but under circumstances little anticipated by anyone at the time the invitation to return was given. When Middleton came of age he turned over the manufacturing business he had inherited, to the family’s agent, Mr. Bolter, and, on leaving college, accepted the invitation of his cousin, Mr. Welch, to go in his law-office. He made only one condition: that the same invitation should be extended to his college chum, Reely Thurston, whom Middleton described to Mr. Welch as “at once the roundest and squarest fellow” in his class. This was enough for Mr. Welch, and within a few months the two young men were at adjoining desks, professing to practise law and really practising whatever other young gentlemen of their age and kind are given to doing: a combination of loafing, working, and airing themselves for the benefit of the rest of mankind, particularly of that portion that wears bonnets and petticoats.