"And now, my dear Archie," continued Jules, "let us come to terms. I am a kindly potentate, and my conditions shall be most easy. To please you, I undertake, on the word of a gentleman, to diminish by one third those tricks of mine which you lack the good taste to appreciate. Come, now, you ought to be satisfied with that if you are not utterly unreasonable, for you see, my dear boy, I love you. I would not have made peace with any one else on such advantageous terms."
Lochiel could not help laughing as he shook the irrepressible lad. It was from this conversation that the friendship between the two boys took its beginning—on Archie's part with a truly Scottish restraint, on the side of Jules with the passionate warmth of which the French heart is capable.
A few weeks later, about a month before the vacation, which began then on the 15th of August, Jules seized his friend's arm and whispered:
"Come into my room. I have just had a letter from father which concerns you."
"Concerns me!" exclaimed the other in astonishment.
"Why are you surprised?" retorted D'Haberville. "Do you think you are not of sufficient importance for any one to concern himself about you? Why, all New France is talking about the handsome Scotchman. The mammas, fearing your influence on the inflammable hearts of their daughters, talk seriously of petitioning our principal never to let you appear in public except with a veil on, like the women of the East."
"Come, stop your fooling, and let me go on with my reading."
"But I am very much in earnest," said Jules. And, dragging his friend along with him, he read him part of a letter from his father, which ran as follows:
"What you tell me about your young friend, Master de Lochiel, interests me very much. I grant your request with the greatest pleasure. Give him my compliments, and beg him to come and spend his next vacation with us, and all his vacations so long as he is attending college. If he does not consider this invitation sufficiently formal, I will write to him myself. His father sleeps upon a glorious field. Soldiers are brothers everywhere; so should their sons be likewise. Let him come to our own hearth-stone, and our hearts shall open to him as to one of our own blood."
Archie was so affected by the warmth of this invitation that for some moments he could not answer.