woman, and child would trust, and never be deceived. For a young man of
twenty-six he had seen a good deal of life, both at home and abroad, but
the bad side had made but little impression upon him.

"It slips from Jack like water from a duck's back, while we poor
wretches get smirched all over," Howard Crompton was wont to say of him,
when smarting from some temptation to which he had yielded, and which
Jack had resisted.

They had been friends since they were boys of eighteen in Europe, and
Howard had nursed him through a fever contracted in Rome. They had also
been chums in Harvard, where both had pulled through rather creditably,
and where Jack had acted as a restraint upon Howard, who was fonder of
larks than of study.

"Are you sure he is the right kind of friend for you?" Jack's
sister--who was many years his senior, and who stood to him in the place
of a mother--sometimes said to him; and he always answered, "He isn't a
bad sort, as fellows go. Too lazy, perhaps, for a chap who has nothing
but expectations from a crabbed, half-cracked old uncle, and not always
quite on the square. But he is jolly good company, and I like him."

Something of this sort he said to his sister, who was in her New York
home on the day when he was starting for Crompton, and had expressed her
doubts of Howard's perfect rectitude in everything.

"He isn't a saint," he said to her, "but I don't forget how he stuck to
me in that beastly place on the Riviera, while every soul of the party
but him hurried off, afraid of the fever. He is having a grand time at
Crompton, and I'm going to help him a while, and then buckle down to
hard work in the office. So good-by, and don't worry."

He kissed her and hurried off to the station, bought the "Century," put
several expensive cigars in the pocket of his overcoat, took a chair in
a parlor car, and felt, as the train sped away out of the city, that it
was good to live, and that Crompton held some new pleasure and
excitement for him, who found sunshine everywhere.

Moving in the same direction and for the same point was another train,
in which Eloise sat, dusty and tired, and homesick for the old
grandmother and the house under the big poplar tree. Added to this was a
harrowing anxiety for news from California.

"If I do not hear by Christmas, I shall certainly take an extra week in
my vacation, and go there," she thought; and then she began to wonder
about Crompton, and District No. 5, and