This final clause would have astonished Herbert if he had been less preoccupied with his troubles.  “You bet she won’t!” he said mechanically.  “She couldn’t ever get in here again—­if the family didn’t go intafering around and give me the dickens and everything, because they think—­they say they do, anyhow—­they say they think—­they think——­”

He paused, disguising a little choke as a cough of scorn for the family’s thinking.

“What did you say your family think?” Henry asked absently.

“Well, they say we ought to let her have a share in our newspaper.”  Again he paused, afraid to continue lest his hypocrisy appear so bare-faced as to invite suspicion.  “Well, maybe we ought,” he said finally, his eyes guiltily upon his toe, which slowly scuffed the ground.  “I don’t say we ought, and I don’t say we oughtn’t.”

He expected at the least a sharp protest from his partner, who, on the contrary, surprised him.  “Well, that’s the way I look at it,” Henry said.  “I don’t say we ought and I don’t say we oughtn’t.”

And he, likewise, stared at the toe of a shoe that scuffed the ground.  Herbert felt a little better; this particular subdivision of his difficulties seemed to be working out with unexpected ease.

“I don’t say we will and I don’t say we won’t,” Henry added.  “That’s the way I look at it.  My father and mother are always talkin’ to me:  how I got to be polite and everything, and I guess maybe it’s time I began to pay some ’tention to what they say.  You don’t have your father and mother for always, you know, Herbert.”

Herbert’s mood at once chimed with this unprecedented filial melancholy.  “No, you don’t, Henry.  That’s what I often think about, myself.  No, sir, a fellow doesn’t have his father and mother to advise him our whole life, and you ought to do a good deal what they say while they’re still alive.”

“That’s what I say,” Henry agreed gloomily; and then, without any alteration of his tone, or of the dejected thoughtfulness of his attitude, he changed the subject in a way that painfully startled his companion.  “Have you seen Wallie Torbin to-day, Herbert?”

“What!”

“Have you seen Wallie Torbin to-day?”

Herbert swallowed.  “Why, what makes—­what makes you ask me that, Henry?” he said.

“Oh, nothin’.”  Henry still kept his eyes upon his gloomily scuffing toe.  “I just wondered, because I didn’t happen to see him in school this afternoon when I happened to look in the door of the Eight-A when it was open.  I didn’t want to know on account of anything particular.  I just happened to say that about him because I didn’t have anything else to think about just then, so I just happened to think about him, the way you do when you haven’t got anything much on your mind and might get to thinkin’ about you can’t tell what.  That’s all the way it was; I just happened to kind of wonder if he was around anywhere maybe.”