“Why, Sydney, what has happened?” she cried, standing still on the threshold and paying no attention to Drom’s cordial greeting.
“Nothing,” said Sydney. “I—perhaps I ran too hard. I don’t feel quite well. How are you after our victory?” He tried to speak easily, but Jan was too well versed in boys’ ways to be deceived.
“You’re in a scrape, Syd,” she said decidedly, entering and shutting the door behind her with a discretion Sydney admired even then. “Won’t you tell me what it is? Or have you told your mother?”
“My mother! No, I guess not,” said Sydney. “I’d be sorry to tell her—if I were in a scrape,” he added, realizing his indirect admission.
“Then tell me,” said Jan, sitting down at the other side of the table with an air that suggested not rising again until she had been told. “Two heads are better than one, and you can trust me.”
“Well, I’m in debt,” said Sydney, yielding at once, glad, perhaps, to share a burden that had been oppressive for some time. “And the fellow writes to say he won’t wait any longer. If I don’t pay up he’ll go to my father. I can’t pay up, so I suppose there’s no help for it, and he’ll have to go.”
“In debt!” Jan exclaimed, her voice low and horror-stricken. “O Syd, that’s awful! What will uncle do if that man goes to him? Who is the man, anyway? Tell me more.”
“He’ll raise the roof, as to father’s part of it, and very likely send me off to boarding-school,” said Sydney, flushing. “The man, as you call him, is a shopkeeper who likes to get the fellows at our school to buy things on tick from him, if he knows there is some one at home who will pay in case they don’t. He even offers to lend us money and put it on the books and not charge any interest. He’s a scamp to do it, and I know it, but I’ve been fool enough—and scamp enough, too—to get things charged and to borrow a little now and then, thinking I could pay up myself. Well, I can’t, and now I’ve got to face the music. It serves me right, but that doesn’t make me enjoy myself any better.”
“O Syd, how could you?” said Jan, who had been brought up to regard debt with horror, and whose father might have to deny his children luxury, but by practise and precept he taught them to live within their means.
“Now, you needn’t lecture,” said Sydney, who found the pained and disappointed look in the brown eyes opposite to him hard to meet. “I know all you can say about its being wrong, but I did it, and there you are! Five dollars a month isn’t much allowance, and that’s all I get.”