"But, my dear, I hope you have not sent him off. Sometimes you are too abrupt."
"Why, mother, I thought that you did not wish them to come with us."
"I was certainly surprised to see Fritz on the boat last evening. But he is like my own son, and if he has set his heart on going to Digby, we must not keep him away."
"Oh, he's going around on the other coast, he and his friend."
"Did you meet his friend?"
"No, I heard Fritz call him 'Taps'—a perfectly ridiculous name. Do you know anything about him?"
"Only what Fritz told me last evening—that he was a Freshman who had taken a violent fancy to him. Fritz said that he had agreed to travel with the boy this summer from a sense of duty."
"A sense of duty!"
"Yes; 'Taps,' as he calls him, has been trying to shake off some undesirable friends. He gave up a trip to Europe that he might avoid running across them, and Fritz, knowing the circumstances, thought that he could do no less than agree to take some other trip with him. It was only on the spur of the moment that they decided to come with us."
"Fritz was terribly cut up to find that we did not care to have them."