Page:Stanwood Pier--Harding of St Timothys.djvu/71

Rh day that the new society had been all a joke; it was rather more humiliating, if anything, to know he had been deluded as well as rebuked.

But Bruce Watson was more sensitive to Harry's lecture.

"The whole thing about the Crown, Bruce," Harry said to him, "is that if it's to have any influence at all,—and a good influence,—the fellows in it must take an interest in the fellows outside it. For a fellow to join it and then cut the friends he's had before is no way to do."

"I was n't meaning to hurt Stoddard's feelings," Watson said meekly. "I just didn't think how it would look. Of course I like him as well as ever, but now there's so much I can't talk over with him. You can't be quite so intimate with a fellow when you're in a secret society and he's not."

"Well, maybe you can't, but you've got to keep him from seeing it," insisted Harry.

Watson declared an intention of being more discreet in the future, and Harry felt quite virtuous. He believed thoroughly in being a