“Nonsense, Uncle Phil!  I meant real paying.  Will ten dollars a month do?”

“It will, provided you don’t try to borrow ahead each month from the next one.”

“I won’t,” glibly.  “If you will—­” The boy broke off and had the grace to look confused, realizing he had been about to do the very thing he had promised in the same breath not to do.  “Then that means I can’t go to Hal’s,” he added soberly.

He felt sober.  There was more than Hal and the house-party involved, though the latter had fallen in peculiarly fortuitous with his other plans.  He had rashly written Madeline he would be in Holyoke next week as she desired, and the first of July and his allowance would still be just out of reach next week.  It was a confounded nuisance, to say the least, being broke just now, with Uncle Phil turned stuffy.

“No, I don’t want you to give up your house-party, though that rests with you.  I’ll make a bargain with you.  I’ll advance your whole July allowance minus ten dollars Saturday morning.”

Ted’s face cleared, beamed like sudden sunshine on a cloudy March day.

“You will!  Uncle Phil, you certainly are a peach!” And in his exuberance he tossed his cap to the ceiling, catching it deftly on his nose as it descended.

“Hold on.  Don’t rejoice too soon.  It was to be a bargain, you know.  You have heard only one side.”

“Oh—­h!” The exclamation was slightly crestfallen.

“I understand that you fell down on most of your college work this spring.  Is that correct?”

This was a new complication and just as he had thought he was safely out of the woods, too.  Ted hung his head, gave consent to his uncle’s question by silence and braced himself for a lecture, though he was a little relieved that he need not bring up the subject of that inconvenient flunking of his, himself; that his uncle was already prepared, whoever it was that had told tales.  The lecture did not come, however.

“Here is the bargain.  I will advance the money as I said, provided that as soon as you get back from Hal’s you will make arrangements to tutor with Mr. Caldwell this summer, in all the subjects you failed in and promise to put in two months of good, solid cramming, no half way about it.”

“Gee, Uncle Phil!  It’s vacation.”

“You don’t need a vacation.  If all I hear of you is true, or even half of it, you made your whole college year one grand, sweet vacation.  What is the answer?  Want time to think the proposition over?”

“No—­o.  I guess I’ll take you up.  I suppose I’ll have to tutor anyway if I don’t want to drop back a class, and I sure don’t,” Ted admitted honestly.  “Unless you’ll let me quit and you won’t.  It is awfully tough, though.  You never made Tony or Larry kill themselves studying in vacations.  I don’t see—­”

“Neither Tony or Larry ever flunked a college course.  It remained for you to be the first Holiday to wear a dunce cap.”