“I wonder when school will close,” remarked Harry Harding to Teddy Burke one morning in late November. It was now a little more than a month since the two chums had enlisted under the banner of Martin Brothers, and they had become thoroughly familiar with the routine of store life.

“After Thanksgiving, I guess,” returned Teddy. It was a cold, blustering morning, but the lads swung down the street apparently unmindful of the officious wind which whisked pedestrians’ hats from their heads and blew the red into their cheeks and noses.

“Won’t it be glorious to have a whole day off?” glowed Harry.

“Will it? Well, I guess maybe,” rejoined Teddy, his small face animated with the prospect of the coming holiday. “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, my mother and I are going to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner and then I’m going to take her to The Pickford, that new motion picture house we pass every day. Oh, yes, we are going to church in the morning. Mother says everyone ought to go to church on Thanksgiving Day, even if one never goes any other time, to give thanks for one’s blessings.”

“I never go to church,” stated Teddy, cheerfully unashamed. “My mother used to take me, but I behaved so bad she quit. I go to Sunday School, but not every Sunday.”

“What did you ever do in church that was so very terrible?” asked Harry, smiling.

“Oh, a lot of things. Once I sang a whole line of a hymn after everybody else got through singing, and I fell out of our pew into the aisle and made all the folks laugh. I tied two girls’ sashes together once in Sunday School. They sat right in front of me and the ends of their ribbons hung down. Maybe they weren’t wild when they started to go home in different directions. Once I lost my nickel for the collection plate, so I put a milk bottle check on the plate instead. It looked just like a quarter, but the man who passed the plate was pretty mad about it. He told my mother afterwards, and she said I’d better stay home, if I couldn’t behave better than that. So I stayed home. I guess that was the best place for me.”

“I always go to the church that Father used to go to with Mother. Sometimes I get tired before it’s out, but sometimes I hear really interesting things,” said Harry. He was still smiling over Teddy’s list of iniquities.

“I don’t mind the singing. It’s the sermons that make me sleepy. I love to sing.” Teddy’s eyes glowed. “I think it’s fine that we have one morning a week for singing. My mother can play the piano, and sing, too. Sometimes she lets me sing with her. I know a lot of songs.”

“I can’t sing very much,” confessed Harry, “but I love to hear singing.”

“I like that Miss Verne, who plays the piano for us at school. She’s so small and pretty. She looks like a little girl dressed up in a grown woman’s clothes. Did you hear Miss Leonard tell three of the boys last Monday that Miss Verne wanted them to sing for her after school?”

“Yes,” nodded Harry. “I heard her tell them. Elmer Barry told me that there is to be a Christmas play, or something, and these boys are going to sing.”

“I wish I was going to be in it,” sighed Teddy wistfully. “I wouldn’t be afraid to sing in public. My mother says I have a good voice.”

“Maybe Miss Verne will ask you to be in the entertainment,” suggested Harry kindly, noting Teddy’s wistful look.

“How can she when she doesn’t even know I can sing? I’m not going to tell her, either. She’d think I was crazy about myself. Oh, I guess I’ll live if I don’t have a chance to show off,” ended Teddy philosophically.

Nevertheless, that morning as Company A filed into the room used as a gymnasium and seated themselves in the rows of chairs arranged for them, Teddy could not help cherishing a faint hope that Miss Verne would notice him and ask him to sing in the Christmas entertainment. There was small chance of that, he reflected, for this was to be their last morning in school until after the holiday rush was over. School closed that Saturday, not to open again until after New Year’s.

“Now, boys,” began Miss Verne, after Company A had sung several songs of her suggesting, “I am going to teach you such a pretty, new song this morning. You’ll like it, I’m sure. Listen while I play and sing the first verse for you.” After a rollicking introduction on the piano, she began a delightful little popular song that had just recently been published and was fast gaining popularity. Although Miss Verne frequently chose popular music for the boys to sing, she was extremely careful in her choice of songs, and never presented any which could be classed as vulgar or over-sentimental.

She played and sang the verse to the boys three times, then said brightly, “Now, boys, you try it.”

With the quick ear for music possessed by the majority of children, the boys took up the first two or three lines of the song at once. They wavered on the fourth line, and at the fifth there was only one boy singing in perfect time with the accompaniment. But that boy was well worth listening to. His clear, soprano voice sang on, growing stronger and surer with every breath. The song ended with a gay little run up to a fairly high note. The boy took the run exquisitely, holding that note for an instant. Miss Verne’s hands dropped from the piano. “Come up here,” she commanded, beckoning to the boy who had sung so sweetly.

With his freckled face only a shade paler than his hair, Teddy Burke reluctantly ascended the platform. In spite of his boastful denial that he wouldn’t be afraid to sing in public, Teddy was decidedly embarrassed. He had not meant to sing a solo. As it happened, the song was one which he had heard his mother practising for the past week to sing at a club entertainment. It had appealed to Teddy from the moment he had first heard it, and happy in the love of letting out his voice in sweet sounds he had sung on, wholly unconscious of singing alone, until the end of the song. The dead silence which followed it, and Miss Verne’s command to come to the piano had awakened him to what he had done.

“What’s your name?” asked the pretty little woman abruptly.

“Teddy—Theodore Burke, ma’am.”

“Well, Teddy, who taught you to sing?”

“No one—I mean—I hear my mother sing and I sing, too,” stammered Teddy.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you have a beautiful voice?”

Teddy’s face blazed with fresh embarrassment at the complimentary grilling he was undergoing. He hung his head and made no reply.

“Well, if no one else ever told you, I am going to tell you now,” Miss Verne said in brisk fashion. “You are just the boy I am looking for to sing the leading part in the Christmas musical play we are getting up. Would you like to sing in it?”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am. I don’t—know—whether I would like it or not,” floundered Teddy.

“Of course you would. The only part you won’t like is rehearsing after the store closes.”

“I don’t mind that,” admitted the boy.

“All right. Take your seat. I’ll talk with you about it after singing is over. Miss Leonard, may I keep this boy here for a moment after the others are gone?”

Miss Leonard bowed a smiling assent. She was very proud to think that one of her boys was to be honored.

“Now, boys,” she returned to her class again. “Let’s try our song once more.”

Teddy Burke finished the rest of the singing period in a delightful daze. Once he gave his hand a wicked little pinch to see if he were really awake. He pinched himself hard enough to leave an angry red spot, so he ruefully concluded that he was not dreaming. Every now and then he glanced shyly at Harry, who beamed at him in a way that left no doubt in Teddy’s mind of Harry’s pleasure in his good fortune.

Harry was unselfishly glad that his friend was to have the longed-for chance to sing, particularly so since he had heard the boy’s sweet voice. He waited anxiously about for a moment after school was over, thinking perhaps Miss Verne would take time merely to make an appointment with his chum after the store closed.

“Don’t loiter here, Harry,” reproved Miss Leonard rather coldly. Although the boy was the soul of good behavior in school, she did not trust him. The growing number of demerits on his card influenced her against him, and instead of inquiring into matters, she placed a secret ban of disapproval upon him and privately characterized him as one of those boys who were well-behaved when watched, and then only. Usually clever in her reading of boy character, she was wholly in error as far as Harry was concerned, an error which time alone could rectify.

Harry glanced wistfully toward the gymnasium, then he went sadly downstairs. Miss Leonard did not like him. She did not trust him. She believed the story of his report card. She would never know that he had not deserved all those demerits, for he could never tell her. How beautifully everything was going for Teddy. He wondered what would have happened to Teddy, had their positions been reversed. Suppose Teddy had been placed at the exchange desk, while he, Harry, had taken Teddy’s place in the house furnishings. Teddy was such a droll little boy. Perhaps Mr. Barton would have liked him. Then he remembered Miss Welch had said that Mr. Barton had never been kind to any of the various boys who had been stationed at the exchange desk. Harry gave a little sigh, then involuntarily straightened his shoulders. He was better fitted to bear harsh treatment than his chum. Teddy would have flared at the first cross word on the part of the crabbed aisle manager. He would have rebelled, defied Mr. Barton, delivered a most uncomplimentary opinion of him to his face, and then he would have walked out of the store without waiting to be discharged. That was precisely what Teddy would have done.

“I’m glad Teddy’s in a nice department and glad folks like him,” was Harry’s honest reflection, as he walked down one of the aisles of the book department to the exchange desk. “I suppose ‘what is to be, will be.’ That’s what Mother always says. Maybe there’s a better day ahead for me, too. Only I guess it’s so far ahead I can’t see it.”

But while he peered hopefully into the veiled future, that “better day” was not far distant, although he was destined to pass through one more ordeal before it dawned.