Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/51

40 the better, I suppose. There can be no real friendship between us."

Floyd looked at him in silence.

"Good Lord, Stewart!" he cried at last, stretching out his hand. Then he saw it was in vain, and for a moment his attitude changed and his face hardened. "I have never done or said anything to you that I regret," he stated proudly.

"I will say this much," Stewart conceded. "I don't blame you more than myself. It was my mistake. After you pulled me out of the water, I ought never to have seen you again—except once, to thank you. You had too great an advantage over me; it was something I could never forget."

"It was something of which I was never conscious," answered Floyd. "Well, I am sorry, Stewart."

Jim Hobart had a spare bedroom, and Stewart arranged to go in with him. That year Stewart spent a few days of his Christmas vacation visiting the Dunbars in Avalon, and did not let Floyd know of his presence in the town; and Floyd, learning of it afterwards, felt a little contemptuous of his former friend.

Yet as time passed and the senior year ran its course, they lost the sense of bitterness. Stewart, who had an ability for political management, helped to secure Floyd's election to an important Class Day office, and said to him lightly, "No matter how we act, we know who are the best people." And one Sunday in May, when Floyd entered the club, which for a couple of years he had visited but little, he found Stewart there alone.

"Let's go for a walk in the country and see the apple blossoms," suggested Stewart after a while.

They took a car to Lexington, and then walked all the way to Concord along the Great Road that the British troops had traversed in distress more than a century before. Now and then they paused to read a sign over a cottage door, commemorating some rustic patriot of that