'I just cheeked him about the Born Poet, didn't I?' he said, laughing. 'But he took it like an angel. You see, they've heard a good bit about Gillingham already. That makes all the difference. Our Head backs Gillingham for next Poet Laureate, if Tennyson holds out long enough. He'll get this history thing slap off; you see if he doesn't. I could tell from the Dean's manner it was as good as decided. They mean to give it to him.'
'But, surely,' Dick cried, flushing up with honest indignation, 'they wouldn't treat it as a foregone conclusion like that. They wouldn't bring us all up here, and put us to the trouble and expense of an hotel, and make us work three days, if they didn't mean to abide by the result of the examination!'
Faussett gazed at him and smiled.
'Well, you are green!' he answered, laughing.
'You are just a verdant one! What lovely simplicity! You don't mean to say you think that's the way this world is governed? I've a father in the House, and I trust I know better. Kissing goes by favour. They'll give it to Gillingham; you may take your oath on that. And a jolly good thing, too; for I'm sure he deserves it!'
Gillingham himself was a trifle more modest and also more cautious. He made no prediction. Brought up entirely in diplomatic circles, he did credit to his teachers. He contented himself with saying in an oracular voice, 'The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,' and throwing back his head in his most poetical manner.
This was a safe quotation, for it committed him to nothing. If he won, it would pass as very charming modesty; if he lost, it would discount and condone his failure.
As for Dick, he strolled with his two chance acquaintances down the beautiful High Street and into the gardens at Magdalen, very heavy in heart at their dire predictions. The cloisters themselves failed to bring him comfort. He felt himself foredoomed already to a disastrous fiasco. So many places and things he had only read about in books, this brilliant, easy-going, very grown-up Trevor Gillingham had seen and mixed in and made himself a part of. He had pervaded the Continent.
The more Gillingham talked, indeed, the more Dick's heart sank. Why, the man knew well every historical site and building in Britain or out of it! History to him was not an old almanac, but an affair of real life. Paris, Brussels, Rome—Bath, Lincoln, Holyrood—he had known and seen them! Dick longed to go back and hide his own discomfited head once more in the congenial obscurity of dear sleepy old Chiddingwick.
But how could he ever go back without that boasted Scholarship? How cover his defeat after Mr. Plantagenet's foolish talk at the White Horse? How face his fellow-townsmen—and Mary Tudor? For very shame's sake, he felt he must brazen it out now, and do the best he knew—for the honour of the family.