“You’re a strong boy, Harrier,” he said, quietly. “You’ve had the advantage of some training, too. This was hardly brave.”
“He called me a coward, sir,” muttered the boy.
“You’ve got to prove he was wrong, then.”
Harrier twitched his shoulders, and gave a defiant upward look.
“What!” said Mr. Sant. “Do you call it proving it to attack him six to one?”
“I takes no count of that raff, sir,” said the boy. “’Twas him and me fought.”
“But you used them to provoke him—not content with insulting him yourself day by day as he came to his lesson. Yes; I know.”
I looked up amazed, and then down again. Certain tell-tale rustlings that had reached my ears occasionally from the back of the rectory palings occurred to me, so that I hung my head with shame.
“Well, your reverence,” said the boy, rather insolently, “pay me, and get it over. I takes my capers with my mutton.”
“I shall pay you, sir,” said Mr. Sant, with, I could have thought, the ghost of a grin, “as one gentleman pays another. You think, perhaps, that Master Bowen here has told of your bullying him. He has not breathed a word about it to anybody. Now that, I think, shows him to be the better man of the two.”