Somehow at the afternoon recess every boy treated Grayson as if he had known him for years, and no one seemed to be jealous when Grayson invited Bert to play marbles with him, and insisted on his late adversary taking the first shot. But the teacher’s remarks about Grayson had only increased the curiosity of the boys about their new comrade, and when Sam Wardwell remarked that old Mrs. Bartle, with whom the teacher and his pupil boarded, bought groceries nearly every evening at his father’s store, and he would just lounge about during the rest of the afternoon and ask her about Grayson when she came in, at least six other boys offered to sit on a board-pile near the store and wait for information. As for Grayson, he sat in the school-room writing while the teacher waited, for more than an hour after the general dismissal, to hear Bert Sharp recite those detestable four pages of history, and Bert was a great deal slower at his task than he would have been if he had not had to wonder why Grayson had to do so much writing. CHAPTER III. _MUSIC AND MANNERS._ THE boys at Mr. Morton’s Select School were not the only people at Laketon who were curious about Paul Grayson. Although the men and women had daily duties like those of men and women elsewhere, they found a great deal of time in which to think and talk about other people and their affairs. So all the boys who attended the school were interrogated so often about their new comrade, that they finally came to consider themselves as being in some way a part of the mystery. Mr. Morton, who had opened his school only several weeks before the appearance of Grayson, was himself unknown at Laketon until that spring, when, after an unsuccessful attempt to be made principal of the grammar-school, he had hired the upper floor of what once had been a store building, and opened a school on his own account. He had introduced himself by letters that the school trustees and Mr. Merivale, pastor of one of the village churches, considered very good; but now that Grayson’s appearance was explained only by the teacher’s statement that the boy was son of an old school friend who was now a widower, some of the trustees wished they were able to remember the names and addresses appended to the letters that the new teacher had presented. Sam Wardwell’s father having learned from Mr. Morton where last he had taught, went so far as to write to the wholesale merchants with whom he dealt, in New York, for the name of some customer in Mr. Morton’s former town; but even by making the most of this roundabout method of inquiry he only learned that the teacher had been highly respected, although nothing was known of his antecedents. With one of the town theories on the subject of Mr. Morton and Paul Grayson the boys entirely disagreed: this was that the teacher and the boy were father and son.