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“So you boys were to spend the night?” Then, as he looked at their startled faces: “I’m right, am I not? You are to spent the night?”

Oh, for courage to say: “Thank you, no. We’ll be going now. We just came over to call on Miss Champe.” But thought of how this would sound in face of the facts, the painful realization that they dared not say it because they had not said it, locked their lips. Their feet were lead; their tongues stiff and too large for their mouths. Like creatures in a nightmare, they moved stiffly, one might have said creakingly, up the stairs and received each—a bedroom candle!

“Good night, children,” said the absent-minded old man. The two gurgled out some sounds which were intended for words and doged behind the bedroom door.

“They’ve put us to bed!” Abner’s black eyes flashed fire. His nervous hands clutched at the collar Ross had lent him. “That’s what I get for coming here with you, Ross Pryor!” And tears of humiliation stood in his eyes.

In his turn Ross showed no resentment. “What I’m worried about is my mother,” he confessed. “She’s so sharp about finding out things. She wouldn’t tease me—she’d just be sorry for me. But she’ll think I went home with you.”

“I’d like to see my mother make a fuss about my calling on the girls!” growled Abner, glad to let his rage take a safe direction.

“Calling on the girls! Have we called on any girls?” demanded clear-headed, honest Ross.

“Not exactly—yet,” admitted Abner, reluctantly. “Come on—let’s go to bed. Mr. Claiborne asked us, and he’s the head of this household. It isn’t anybody’s business what we came for.”

“I’ll slip off my shoes and lie down till Babe ties up the dog in the morning,” said Ross. “Then we can get away before any of the family is up.”

Oh, youth—youth—youth, with its rash promises! Worn out with misery the boys slept heavily. The first sound that either heard in the morning was Babe hammering upon their bedroom door. They crouched guiltily and looked into each other’s eyes. “Let pretend we ain’t here and he’ll go away,” breathed Abner.

But Babe was made of sterner stuff. He rattled the knob. He turned it.
He put in a black face with a grin which divided it from ear to ear.
“Cady say I mus’ call dem fool boys to breakfus’,” he announced. “I
never named you-all dat. Cady, she say dat.”

“Breakfast!” echoed Ross, in a daze.

“Yessuh, breakfus’,” reasserted Babe, coming entirely into the room and looking curiously about him. “Ain’t you-all done been to bed at all?” wrapping his arms about his shoulders and shaking with silent ecstasies of mirth. The boys threw themselves upon him and ejected him.

“Sent up a servant to call us to breakfast,” snarled Abner. “If they’d only sent their old servant to the door in the first place, all this wouldn’t ‘a’ happened. I’m just that way when I get thrown off the track. You know how it was when I tried to repeat those things to you—I had to go clear back to the beginning when I got interrupted.”

“Does that mean that you’re still hanging around here to begin over and make a call?” asked Ross, darkly. “I won’t go down to breakfast if you are.”

Abner brightened a little as he saw Ross becoming wordy in his rage.
“I dare you to walk downstairs and say,
‘We-just-dropped-in-to-call-on-Miss-Champe’!” he said.

“I—oh—I—darn it all! there goes the second bell. We may as well trot down.”

“Don’t leave me, Ross,” pleaded the Jilton boy. “I can’t stay here—and I can’t go down.”

The tone was hysterical. The boy with freckles took his companion by the arm without another word and marched him down the stairs. “We may get a chance yet to call on Champe all by herself out on the porch or in the arbor before she goes to school,” he suggested, by way of putting some spine into the black-eyed boy.