'Why didn't you tell him to take himself off?' said one, when Taylor had walked away. 'This is getting a bit too much. You stand up for yourself and your father, if he comes any more of that bullying. What right has he to say who shall come to Torrington's? If he had spoken of my father like that, he should have had a black eye, if he killed me for it afterwards!' added his friend.
Leonard sighed, 'You don't know Taylor as well as I do,' he said. 'He isn't a bad sort of fellow, if you let him have his own way.'
'But it's such a beastly way that I wouldn't put up with it,' said the other. 'He may be "the cock of the walk," but he need not think we are all going to cackle to him like a set of hens. I mean to take that fellow out of Coventry after this. Come on, let us both walk home with him a bit, and see how the cock likes that. There's Howard just ahead; let's catch him.'
But instead of quickening his pace Leonard looked timorously back; and there was Taylor with a group of lads round him vigorously declaiming against the County Council for sending one of their scholarship boys to Torrington's. So Leonard felt afraid to join this unpopular scholar, and set himself in defiance of the present wave of anger that was passing over his friends, and he turned down a by-road and walked home by himself.
CHAPTER IV.
Dr. Morrison.
Leonard Morrison found himself sent to Coventry, not by his schoolfellows, but by his sister. It was just the punishment he had decided she deserved for daring to have an opinion of her own that differed from his, and so to find himself 'hoist with his own petard' made him very angry.
'Where is Flo going to do her lessons to-night?' he asked his mother, when he went to the study and found it in darkness. His sister usually lighted the lamp ready for him, but his mother had come with him to do it to-night.