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16 hard feeling, we'll give it up; but I don't believe it will. What do you say?"

"Oh, I think it would be fun," said Stoddard. His eyes were shining at the thought. "Thank you for wanting me to be the other member."

"I'll see about getting half a dozen cheap pins," said Rupert, "and we'll have to think up a name for it."

They walked on, talking about this, Stoddard never suspecting all the kindness that had inspired the idea. Rupert had proposed it with the thought that it might relieve the lonely boy's sense of desertion; it was a way of stepping into Bruce Watson's place.

Meanwhile the members of the Crown had, as Rupert had guessed, made off to their Sunday afternoon rendezvous. It was the absurd theory that, sauntering away in detachments, they excited no suspicion of their real purpose. When Harry Harding and Joe Herrick and Bruce Watson, who were the last to start, came up over the brow of the hill beyond the school, they found their comrades