Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/47

36 out a problem in mathematics. Then Stewart came over to him.

"Floyd," he said, "I want to beg your pardon. It was a low-down thing for me to do."

Floyd raised his eyes slowly; his face looked dull in its effort to comprehend.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"The picture," Stewart answered. "I'm ashamed of having made fun of you that way."

"Why," cried Floyd, "it was—" And then he stopped short. Looking up at Stewart's downcast face and evasive eyes, he began to understand. He sat up, and then reaching out dragged Stewart down to the seat beside him.

"See here," he said, "why do you treat me differently from your other friends? If you'd made that drawing of Jim Hobart, you'd have rushed right off to show it to him. You'd never have apologized. What's the matter, Stewart?"

"There's a difference," Stewart replied uneasily. "I can do things to other fellows that I ought n't to you. I owe you too much—and I can't forget it—or if I do forget it, then I'm ashamed and ungrateful. You see, when you owe a fellow your life—"

He stopped with a helpless wave of the hand. Floyd was silent. Stewart sat with one foot cocked up over his knee, plucking nervously at his shoe-strings.

"You see," he went on, "you have an advantage over me, a perfectly hopeless advantage; nothing I can ever do, nothing I can ever say, can even things up between us. And I hate this knowing inside me that I'm always at a disadvantage."

"Well," said Floyd, after a moment, "I hate to hear you talk of 'evening things up' and 'being at a disadvantage.' It sounds almost as if you had a grudge to square off." He laughed uncomfortably, while Stewart's fingers worked at the shoe-string, untying it, retying it.