"Now, none of your cheek, you know!" said Tipping, edging up against him with a dangerous inclination first to jostle aggressively, and then maul his unconscious rival. "You just mind what I say. I'm not going to have Dulcie bothered by a young beggar in the second form; she deserves something better than that, anyway, and I tell you that if I once catch you talking to her in the way you did just now, or if I hear of her favouring you more than any other fellows, I'll give you the very juiciest licking you ever had in your life. So look out!"
At this point the other boys began to straggle down and cluster round the fire, and Paul withdrew from the aggrieved Tipping, and looked drearily out of the window on the hard road and bare black trees outside.
"I must tell the Doctor how I'm situated!" he thought; "and yet directly I open my mouth, he threatens to flog me. If I stay here, that little girl will be always trying to speak to me, and I shall be thrashed by the red-haired boy. If I could only manage to speak out after breakfast!"
It was not without satisfaction that he remembered that he paid extra for "meat for breakfast" in his son's school-bills, for he was beginning to look forward to meal-time with the natural desire of a young and healthy frame for nourishment.
At eight o'clock the Doctor came in and announced breakfast, leading the way himself to what was known in the school as the "Dining Hall." It scarcely deserved so high-sounding a name perhaps, being a long low room on the basement floor, with a big fireplace, fitted with taps, and baking ovens, which provoked the suspicion that it had begun existence as a back kitchen.
The Doctor took his seat alone at a cross table forming the top of one of the two rows of tables, set with white cups and saucers, and plates well heaped with the square pieces of bread and butter, while Mrs. Grimstone with Dulcie and Tom, sat at the foot of the same row, behind two ugly urns of dull block-tin.
But when Mr. Bultitude, more hungry than he had felt for years, found his place at one of the tables, he was disgusted to find upon his plate—not, as he had confidently expected, a couple of plump poached eggs, with their appetising contrast of ruddy gold and silvery white, not a crisp and crackling sausage or a mottled omelette, not even the homely but luscious rasher, but a brace of chill forbidding sardines, lying grim and headless in bilious green oil!
It was a fish he positively loathed, nor could it be reasonably expected that the confidence necessary for a declaration was to be forgotten by so sepulchral a form of nutriment.
He roused himself, however, to swallow them, together with some of the thin and tin-flavoured coffee. But the meal as a whole was so different from the plentiful well-cooked breakfasts he had sat down before for years as a matter of course, that it made him feel extremely unwell.
No talking was allowed during the meal. The Doctor now and then looked up from his dish of kidneys on toast (at which envious glances were occasionally cast) to address a casual remark to his wife across the long row of plates and cups, but, as a rule, the dull champing sound of boys solemnly and steadily munching was all that broke the silence.