Ariel Custer by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

life. Why, he even sidled into the Methodist church sometimes with her of a Sunday evening and admitted he wouldn’t mind going into a Sunday school class if she were only the teacher. The difficulty was that Ariel’s presence was so quiet and unobtrusive that she had not been asked to take a Sunday school class as yet. Which is a pity, for had Dick come to Sunday school, his entire baseball team would have followed.
    Dick invited Ariel to attend a baseball game one Saturday afternoon and Jud came with her, to Dick’s overwhelming satisfaction. Jud himself was no small person in the athletic world. The boys of the high school team often got him to coach them or to umpire a game, and as a pitcher he was in great demand always, although at that time he had little time to give to outdoor sports. But his presence at a game was enough to give prestige to the team for a month or two.
    Jud praised Dick’s home run when he swaggered up to them all hot and beaded with perspiration during an interval in the game, and they talked in terms of sportsmen. Jud treated Dick like a man, and he swelled with importance as he trudged loftily back to take his place in the game once more, his heart beating high with happiness. He began his sentences with “Jud Granniss says” more than once, showing his intimacy with that great light in the baseball world, and he swayed his team by a few well-directed quotations from him, so that they came off triumphant and with great applause from the bleachers.
    After that game Dick’s adoration included Jud as well as Ariel, and there was nothing he would not do for them both. The world, perhaps, does not recognize what a treasure there is in the friendship of one such boy. He is a mine of faithfulness and chivalry, of loyalty even to martyrdom, and of devotion unequaled. It even extended in Dick’s case to a cessation, on his part, of hostilities between himself and Harriet Granniss, as soon as he discovered that Harriet Granniss was mother to his hero.
    The friendship between Ariel and Jud grew with the weeks. The fact that Jud had left home made him feel strangely alone in the world and tended to strengthen his interest in Ariel.
    They did not flaunt their friendship before the world. In fact, they were most quiet and circumspect about it, but Harriet Granniss lost no time in putting herself in touch with her son’s every movement. There are always people enough who are willing to spy and to tell if you make it worth their while, and Harriet had a number of such emissaries among her women friends; “cats,” Jud called them, but then, Jud was prejudiced. He took little pains, however, to make the best impression before them, and perhaps Harriet Granniss was often justified in the bitter tears she shed into her pillow after the Boggs girl had left her for the night and gone to her room with a book and a fresh wad of gum. The people who kept Harriet supplied with news were not always accurate and frequently resorted to exaggeration when facts failed to give zest to their tales. Often Emily Dillon might have told her the truth and dispelled her anxiety, but Emily Dillon had no thought of all that was going on in Harriet’s mind. She went her serene, quiet way and tried to feel as little as possible the obnoxious presence of Helena Boggs, who seemed to have become a fixture in the house. Life had not led her to expect a pleasant pathway.
    Harriet Granniss was going on her grim determined way with the Boggs girl despite the defection of Jud. By sheer force of will she seemed to think she could bring him back again to submit to her plans for his life. Jud came home once or twice for some of his belongings, and held brief, fiery talks with his mother. He never came without first telephoning Emily Dillon to find out if the Boggs girl was away from the house. The last time he came, he packed his trunk and cleaned the room of every scrap that belonged to him. What he did not want to keep, he carried down