David opened the lid of his desk.
“I say, Mullins,” he remarked to the last speaker, “if you don’t know, you’d better find out. I’ll ask you about it when we go up to dormitory.”
“Right oh,” said Mullins, strong in the consciousness of numbers to back him; “but lots of chaps will tell you.”
“Then I’ll ask them all,” said David. “Two at a time, if they funk.”
His heart quaked, but the essence of courage is not that your heart should not quake, but that nobody else should know that it does.
“Jesse had younger sons as well,” said somebody else, while Mullins was thinking about this. “There was one who was ruddy. I should think it was beastly to be ruddy.”
“Oh, yes. He was an awful corker, and kept sheep. Don’t suppose he could keep wickets or anything like that. Probably he couldn’t hold the simplest catch, either. But I expect he could spoon them up himself, all right. Old Jesse would like that. He would probably say ‘Well played.’ ”
“I say, what was the name of the kid?” asked a voice in tones of the intensest interest.
David had been rummaging in his desk in a meaningless manner, not in order to find anything, but to have something to do to cover his self-consciousness. But when this direct question was asked his hand closed firmly on a tight, solid classical dictionary, and he waited for the answer.
“I think he was called David,” said Mullins, who had plucked up again after David’s threat, which had silenced him for the time. “Yes, David, I think,” he repeated.