As a matter of fact, he had come to Grafton with many misgivings. He had spent most of his sixteen years in England, only coming across to this country at long intervals and for brief stays. At such times his mother’s house on the East Shore in Maryland had been opened up for two or three months, infrequently for a longer period, and Hugh had lived a life not greatly different from his life in England. His father, a member of Parliament, and holding a position under the government, seldom accompanied them across. Within the last three years Hugh’s visits in the United States had occurred annually and had lasted longer, for his mother, whose idea it was to have Hugh educated in America, thought it well for him to know the country better than he did. Consequently, they had traveled a good deal last year and the year before, accompanied invariably by a tutor. That would not have been an American youth’s notion of ideal sight-seeing, but Hugh had been brought up with, first a governess, and, subsequently, a tutor at his elbow, and was thoroughly used to having them around. Nevertheless, when, last year, the Balliol College tutor had been left behind and a young, red-headed, and extremely energetic graduate of Yale had appeared at Shorefields and taken the boy in charge, Hugh had welcomed the change. That fall and during part of the following winter Hugh had been coached for Grafton School. He had, for instance, a far more mature outlook but Mr. Fairway wouldn’t hear of it. Why waste a year, he asked, when, with a little harder work, he could enter the upper middle? Hugh, who had no great enthusiasm for the program in any case, agreed that to waste a year would be a criminal matter and set diligently to work unlearning not a little of what his English tutor had taught him. When, in January, they had returned to London he was pronounced ready for Grafton, his name was entered for admission the next September and he had contracted a certain amount of pleasurable anticipation, most of which, however, evaporated before he was once more headed across the ocean in August. By that time a realization of the fact that this New England preparatory school for which he was booked was quite dissimilar to any school of which he had knowledge, that the fellows he would meet there were different from him in manners and point of view, that, in short, he was taking a plunge into a strange pool filled with strange fishes, filled him with alarm. That he managed to conceal any sign of it was creditable. But he had found the school not so different, after all, from those he knew of, and the fellows were far less strange in their ways, views and speech than he had expected. Perhaps he did not actually give Bert the credit for bringing all this about, but he did somehow arrive at the conclusion that his roommate had worked something in the nature of a miracle in his behalf, and his gratitude, although not expressed in words, was deep and evident. Gratitude even when out