Gordon, who had figured it out, began to give his necessary expenses.  When he had finished, the old man counted out his bills.  Gordon said he would give him his note for it, and his father would indorse it.  The other shook his head.

“No; I don’t want any bond.  I’ll remember it and you’ll remember it.  I’ve known too many men think they’d paid a debt when they’d given their bond.  I don’t want you to think that.  If you’re goin’ to pay me, you’ll do it without a bond, and if you ain’t, I ain’t goin’ to sue you; I’m jest goin’ to think what a’ o’nery cuss you are.”

So Gordon returned home, and a few weeks later was delving deep into new mysteries.

Gordon’s college life may be passed over.  He worked well, for he felt that it was necessary to work.

Looking around when he left college, the only thing that appeared in sight for Gordon Keith was to teach school.  To be sure, the business; “the universal refuge of educated indigents,” as his father quoted with a smile, was already overcrowded.  But Gordon heard of a school which up to this time had not been overwhelmed with applicants.  There was a vacancy at the Ridge College.  Finally poor Gunn, after holding out as long as he could, had laid down his arms, as all soldiers must do sooner or later, and Gordon applied for the position.  The old squire remembered the straight, broad-shouldered boy with his father’s eyes and also remembered the debt he owed him, and with the vision of a stern-faced man with eyes of flame riding quietly at the head of his men across a shell-ploughed field, he wrote to Gordon to come.

“If he’s got half of his daddy in him he’ll straighten ’em out,” he said.

So, Gordon became a school-teacher.

“I know no better advice to give you,” said General Keith to Gordon, on bidding him good-by, “than to tell you to govern yourself, and you will be able to govern them.  ’He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.’”

During the years in which Gordon Keith was striving to obtain an education as best he might, Ferdy Wickersham had gone to one of the first colleges of the land.  It was the same college which Norman Wentworth was attending.  Indeed, Norman’s being there was the main reason that Ferdy was sent there.  Mr. Wickersham wished his son to have the best advantages.  Mrs. Wickersham desired this too, but she also had a further motive.  She wished her son to eclipse Norman Wentworth.  Both were young men of parts, and as both had unlimited means at their disposal, neither was obliged to study.

Norman Wentworth, however, had applied himself to secure one of the high class-honors, and as he was universally respected and very popular, he was regarded as certain to have it, until an unexpected claimant suddenly appeared as a rival.

Ferdy Wickersham never took the trouble to compete for anything until he discovered that some one else valued it.  It was a trait he had inherited from his mother, who could never see any one possessing a thing without coveting it.