Page:Dave Porter in the Gold Fields.djvu/101

Rh "It must have been fine." Nat gave a sigh. "I wish I had been—but what's the use? You fellows wouldn't care for me."

"What were you going to say, Nat?"

"I might have been there myself, if I hadn't—well, if I hadn't made a big fool of myself!" burst out the money-lender's son. "Yes, that's what I did, made a fool of myself! Uncle Tom told me the plain truth."

"I thought you said you'd been visiting an aunt."

"So I have, but she's married again,—married a man named Tom Allen, a merchant. He knows father, and he flocked it into the old man in great shape," and Nat actually chuckled. "Told me just what kind of a man dad was—hard-fisted and miserly—somebody nobody loved or wanted to associate with. And he warned me not to grow up the same way—not to think money was everything, and all that. He said a boy ought to be known for his real worth, not his dollars and his clothes."

"He's right there, Nat."

"Yes, he opened my eyes. And when he asked me about Oak Hall, and you fellows, and how I had missed passing, he told me the truth about myself. I—well, I resented it at first, but by and by I got to thinking he must be right, and the more I thought of it, the more I made up my