Sometimes Pentridge would accompany me on my rides abroad, and I was glad to have him, for he was always good company, and, liking the man for his own sake, I could not feel mean enough to hate him for being more fortunate than myself. On one such occasion—Beryl having laughingly but firmly ordered him out of the schoolroom where she was giving Iris, and now George, their morning lessons, and thus throwing him for refuge on me—he said something that set me thinking.
“D’you know, Holt, I’m beginning to feel beastly jealous of you.”
“So? And why?”
“Why, the way you seem to have captured every one here.”
“Didn’t know it.”
“But you have. Why, it’s ‘Holt says this’ and ‘Kenrick thinks that’ on all hands, till I believe if you weren’t such a good chap I’d rather dislike you.”
“‘You do me proud,’ Pentridge—unless, that is, you’re pulling my leg. Otherwise I hadn’t the faintest idea of anything of the kind, and don’t see why it should be so now.”
I believe I spoke with needless bitterness, but at the moment I could not help thinking how much greater reason I had for disliking him.
“Well, but it is. Good old Matterson isn’t effusive, as you know, and I’ve never heard him boom any one before. But he’s always booming you. That time the Kafirs made that raid on you, he swears you stood by him like a brick.”
“Well, I could hardly turn tail and run away, could I?”