“What would your mamma say if she saw you,” he asked at last, instinctively dropping his voice to a whisper.

“She’d tell popsey,” Johan rejoined promptly, “and I’d get another licking.  But it’s worth it.”

There was a long pause during which Keith watched his old playmate’s unmistakable enjoyment with a mixture of consternation and admiration, of envy and resentment.

“I have got another,” said Johan after a while.  “Try it.”

Keith shook his head.  He was on the verge of saying that “mamma won’t let me,” but checked himself in time as he recalled the results of an earlier use of that too truthful explanation.

“Murray wouldn’t smoke,” he ventured after another pause.

“Him up there, you mean,” inquired Johan with a gesture of his thumb toward the house across the lane, Of course, he wouldn’t.  He’s a miss.”

“He is not,” Keith cried passionately.

“And he’s a stiff, too,” Johan went on without any particular display of feeling.  “And you’re a fool, that’s all.”

There was a coolness between them.

“I think mamma is waiting for me,” remarked Keith as he started to walk off.

“Of course she is waiting for her baby,” Johan retorted with a leer.

Keith stopped and thought.  Murray would fight for a thing like that, he said to himself.  Or would he?  Without having reached a decision Keith made for his own house, trying to look as if Johan didn’t exist.

“He has no real use for you, and you’ll find it out,” was Johan’s parting shot.

Keith was suddenly struck with the coarseness of Johan’s manners and speech.  He was making comparisons in his mind, and as a result the image of Murray seemed more resplendent than ever.

XVIII

“Did you ever try to smoke,” he asked Murray next morning.

“No,” was the disdainful reply.  “I know papa wouldn’t like it, and it’s nasty anyhow.”

“How do you know,” wondered Keith.

“Because I know,” rejoined Murray.  It was a way he had, and it always settled the matter.  A cold, tired look would appear on his face if Keith tried to press a subject after such an answer, and before that look Keith quailed.

His state was hopeless.  He accepted as law whatever his friend said or did.  And although their friendship, such as it was, lasted only two years, Keith did not take up smoking until he was in camp as a conscript at the age of twenty.

In school it was the same.  And the fact that Murray attended to his studies with scrupulous exactness was probably one of the factors that helped Keith through the grade without any loss of standing as a scholar.