The School House and the Lodge were like none of the other houses. Instead of standing by themselves in the town or on the hill, each formed a part of the distinctive group of which the chapel and the great schoolroom were the salient features. Their quadrangles not only adjoined, but there was no line of demarcation to show where one began or the other ended. In both the study doors opened straight into the fresh air; but in neither was a boy to be seen as Carpenter and Rutter caught up the flying remnant of the forty-two.
“Let’s go back by the Lodge,” said Jan, when at last they were let out for good. But now the scene was changing. Groups of two and three were dotted about in animated conversation, some still in their journey hats, others in old school caps with faded badges, but none who took the smallest notice of the new boys with the new badges, which they had still to learn to crease correctly over the peak.
And now it was that Rutter horrified his companion by accosting with apparent coolness a big fellow just emerged from one of the Lodge studies.
“Do you mind telling us if a boy they call Devereux has got back yet?” asked Jan, with more of his own idioms than he had often managed to utter in one breath.
“I haven’t seen him,” the big fellow answered civilly enough. But his stare followed the retreating couple, one of whom had caught the other by the arm.
“I shouldn’t talk about 'a boy,’ if I were you,” Carpenter was saying as nicely as he could.
But Rutter was quite aware of his other solecisms, though not of this one, and was already too furious with himself to brook a gratuitous rebuke.
“Oh! isn’t it the fashion? Then I’ll bet you wouldn’t!” he cried, as he shook off the first arm which had ever been thrust through his by a gentleman’s son.
A ball like a big white bullet was making staccato music in Heriot’s outer fives-court; two school caps were bobbing above the back wall; and a great thick-lipped lad of sixteen or seventeen, who was hanging about the door leading to the studies, promptly asked the new boys their names.
“What’s your gov’nor?” he added, addressing Carpenter first.