ture; the human
sensibilities predominated, and he was anxious to acquire Mr. Stelling's
approbation by showing some quickness at his lessons, if he had known
how to accomplish it.

In his secret heart Tom yearned to have Maggie with him, and, before the
first dreary half-year was ended, Maggie actually came. Mrs. Stelling
had given a general invitation for the little girl to come and stay with
her brother; so when Mr. Tulliver drove over to King's Lorton late in
October, Maggie came too, with the sense that she was taking a great
journey, and beginning to see the world.

"Well, my lad," Mr. Tulliver said, "you look rarely! School agrees with
you!"

"I don't think I _am_ well, father," said Tom; "I wish you'd ask Mr.
Stelling not to let me do Euclid--it brings on the toothache, I think."

"Euclid, my lad--why, what's that?" said Mr. Tulliver.

"Oh, I don't know! It's definitions and axioms and triangles and things.
It's a book I've got to learn in--there's no sense in it."

"Go, go!" said Mr. Tulliver reprovingly. "You mustn't say so. You must
learn what your master tells you. He knows what it's right for you to
learn."

In the second term Mr. Stelling had a second pupil--Philip, the son of
Lawyer Wakem, Mr. Tulliver's standing enemy.

Philip was a very old-looking boy, Tom thought. His spine had been
deformed through an accident in infancy, and to Tom he was simply a
humpback. He had a vague notion that the deformity of Wakem's son had
some relation to the lawyer's rascality, of which he had so often heard
his father talk with hot emphasis.

There was a natural antipathy of temperament between the two boys; for
Tom was an excellent bovine lad, and Philip was sensitive, and suffered
acute pain when the other blurted out offensive things.

Maggie, on her second visit to King's Lorton, pronounced Philip to be "a
nice boy."

"He couldn't choose his father, you know," she said to Tom. "And I've
read of very bad men who had good sons, as well as good parents who had
bad children."

"Oh, he's a queer fellow," said Tom curtly, "and he's as sulky as can be
with me because I told him his father was a rogue. And I'd a right to
tell him so, for it was true--and he began it with calling me names."

An accident to Tom's foot brought the two boys nearer again, and also
threw Philip and Maggie together.

"Maggie," said Philip one day, "if you had had a brother like me, do you
think you should have loved him as well a