"Told your folks a lie, did you?" he muttered after a time. "Well, that wasn't half as bad as stealing from them, and I----" Without finishing the sentence, he closed the door of the carriage house. CHAPTER XXI. A PERSISTENT RASCAL. Nearly always it is false pride that spurs on the naturally decent fellow who realizes he has made a mistake and knows deep down in his heart that the course he is pursuing is wrong. Thus it was with Phil Springer. Time and again his conscience condemned him and his judgment bade him come forth like a man and own up to his error, but his pride would not let him yield. And so Phil found himself sulking at school, seeking to bear the atmosphere of one who had been treated outrageously, and growing more and more resentful and sullen as time passed and none of the fellows came around to coddle and coax him. He had felt certain that he would be approached by some of them, and repeatedly he had rehearsed the speeches by which he would let them know exactly how he felt about it, resolved carefully to avoid uttering a word which might convey the impression that he regarded himself as a single whit at fault. But no one--not even Cooper or Tuttle--approached him, and he began to believe that the time he had spent in constructing and committing those speeches of mingled defense and accusation had been wasted. He had once been deeply concerned in a plan by which Rodney Grant had been practically ostracized by the academy boys, and now, to his deepening rage, while Grant floated high on the wave of popularity, he found himself ignored. Phil was naturally a sociable fellow, and a very little of such treatment was sufficient to make him suffer keenly. Nevertheless he sought to hide the fact beneath a haughty and disdainful air, which was a course his disposition and temperament hardly qualified him to do. His sister, who had not attended the game at Clearport, was the first of his family to learn that he had fibbed about that game, and this she did not discover until the following Monday morning, when her chum, Lela Barker, told her everything. "Oh, Phil," Sadie had said when she found a chance to speak with him privately, "what made you tell father such a whopper about the game? Why, it wasn't stopped by rain at all, and they say you ran away right in the middle of it, and that Roger wanted you after that when they got to hitting Rodney, and that you couldn't be found anywhere, and that all the fellows are sore on you because you skipped out, and that----" "Oh, cut it!" interrupted Phil. "What do I cuc-care what they say! Let them talk their heads off." "But, Phil," persisted the girl, "what made you do it? You don't want to get everybody down on you, do you?" "They can get down on me or not, just as they pup-please!" he flung back. "I know when I get a rotten deal, and Roger Eliot, or Rod Grant, or anybody else can't wipe his feet on me more than once--that's all!"