Harry's mouth watered, but he said he didn't know, and contrived to force another smile as he held out a trembling hand.
"Got to be going, have you?" said the City youth. "I thought you bloated Johnnies were never in a hurry? Well, well, give a poor devil a thought sometimes, cooped up at a desk all day long. Good-bye—you lucky dog!"
The tears were in Harry's eyes as he went his way, yet the smile was still upon his lips, and it was grimly genuine now. If only the envious Barker knew where the envy really lay! How was it he did not? To the conscious wretch it was a revelation that all the world was not conversant with his disappointment and his disgrace.
To think that he had talked of going up to Oxford next term! It had never been quite decided, and he blushed to think how he must have spoken of it at sea. Still more was he ashamed of his want of common pluck in pretending for a moment that he was going up still.
"'Pluck lost, all lost,'" he thought, remorsefully; "and I've lost it already! Oh, what would Innes think of me, for carrying his motto in my heart when I don't need it, and never acting on it when I do!"
That night he wrote it out on the back of a visiting card, and tacked the tiny text to the wall above his bed:—
"MONEY LOST—LITTLE LOST
HONOUR LOST—MUCH LOST
PLUCK LOST—ALL LOST."
And his old master's motto sent Harry Ringrose with a stout heart on many another errand to the City, and steeled and strengthened him when he came home hopeless in the evening. Yet it was very, very hard to live up to; and many also were the unworthy reactions which afflicted him in those dark summer days, that he had expected to be so free from care, and so full of happiness.
One afternoon he crept down from a stockbroker's office, feeling smaller than ever (for that stockbroker had made the shortest work yet of him), to see a man selling halfpenny papers over a placard that proclaimed "extraordinary scoring at Lord's." A spirit of recklessness came over Harry, and buying a paper was but the thin end of his extravagance. A minute later he had counted his money and found enough to take him to St. John's Wood and into the ground; and it was still the money that he had obtained for his curios; and town was intolerable with that sinister London heat which none feel more than your seasoned salamander from the tropics. Harry's new clothes were sticking to him, and he thought how delicious it would be at Lord's. To think was to argue. What was sixpence after all? He had had no lunch, and that would have cost him sixpence more or less; he would do without any lunch, and go to Lord's instead.