“Looks like it, don’t it? I say, how jolly white you’ve got.”
“Have you asked for a holiday, Percy!” she said, responding to his caress, and noting at the same time how tall and manly he was growing, for he was passing from the tall, thin boy into the big, bony, ill-shaped young man, with a hoarse voice and a faint trace of down upon his lip and chin.
At the same time she noted a peculiarly fast, flashy style of dress that he had adopted, his trousers fitting tightly to his legs, his hair being cut short, and his throat wrapped in a common, showy-looking tie, fastened with a horseshoe pin.
“Have I asked for a what?” he said, changing countenance a little—“a holiday? Well, yes, I suppose I have—a long one. Eh, ma?”
He looked at Mrs Thorne as if asking for help, and she responded at once.
“I wouldn’t let Percy come into the school, my dear, but let him wait till you came out,” she said. “The fact is, Hazel, my dear, the poor boy has been so put upon and ill-used at the place where he consented to act as clerk, that at last, in spite of his earnest desire to stay there for both our sakes, my dear—I think I am expressing your feelings, Percy?”
“Right as the mail!” he replied quickly.
“He felt that as a gentleman he could submit no longer, and so he has left and come down.”
“Left and come down?” said Hazel mechanically, as she thought of the narrowness of her present income, and the impracticability of making it feed another hearty appetite as well as those at home.
“Yes; they were such a set of cads, you know,” said Percy, sticking a cheap glass in one eye and holding it there by the brow. “Regular set of cads, from the foreman down to the lowest clerk.”