"It's time you learned. Good-bye."
"Good-bye, sir," Don said gratefully. When his uncle was in the doorway again, he remembered to ask: "What'll I tell him—Conroy? He'll know you've been here."
"Tell him?" Mr. McLean answered savagely. "Tell him I think it'll do him good to go down to New York and get some sense bumped into him. Tell him we'll say no more about it if he comes back to me at Christmas with some honest wages in his pocket. Tell him I hope he'll learn what it is to have a good home and everything provided for him. That's what you'll tell him—and it's true. . . . If it isn't too late," he added, in another voice, "we'll make a man of him yet."
Don heard him stumping down the stairs. When he heard the front door shut with a slam, he turned over the roll of bills, and grinning fiercely he reached his arms up over his head, menacing the ceiling with the triumphant defiance of a prisoner who cries out insults on the walls of the dungeon he is about to leave.
He ran out, with the news, to find Conroy and Pittsey; and Conroy received it with a doleful relief that failed to see why Don was so elated. The rest of the afternoon was taken up with paying Mrs. Stewart, moving baggage and buying tickets, for they were to start on the early morning train. It was not until after supper that Don was free to call on "Miss Margaret," whom he had not seen since Saturday. "No, I can't come in," he told the maid, warned by the lights that
