“The name is rejected,” said Wendell, and resigned the chair.
The meeting went on, several other names were proposed and accepted. After the adjournment, Tony, bitterly disappointed not in the result, which he had feared, but by the means it had been obtained, avoided speaking with his friends, and hurried out. In the corridor he came face to face with Kit. Their eyes met, and Tony’s lip curled contemptuously. “Well,” he exclaimed sarcastically, “you were successful, weren’t you!”
Kit stared back with a dark scowl on his good-looking, usually kindly face. “I did as I thought right,” he answered.
Tony smiled with a look of insulting incredulity. “Let me congratulate you on your sense of duty.” Then he hurried on to his own room, and fell to work with self-deceptive industry at his books.
CHAPTER XVI
A RIFT IN FRIENDSHIP
The prominent members of a particular set of boys can scarcely be on bad terms with each other without the relations of them all being more or less affected, and this was certainly the case with our friends at Deal. Tony had more and more become the real leader of the little circle, so that Kit’s defection partook of the nature of a rebellion.
Tack Turner, who had blackballed Finch at Kit’s request, had by that act lined himself on Wilson’s side. He was a slow, rather dull boy, quieter than the others, but generally liked. He had not felt particularly one way or the other with regard to Finch, and had agreed with Kit chiefly because it happened to be Kit that spoke to him first. But having given his word, he was of that tenacious and somewhat unintelligent type, that will stick to it whether subsequent events show his position to be a reasonable one or not. His semi-indifferent attitude was transformed, however, into violent partisanship for Kit, as Tony took occasion the morning after the Dealonian meeting to express his opinion of Tack’s blackballing Finch somewhat caustically.