"Oh," said Jim, jerking himself away savagely, "it's easy for you to talk! I wish the place was at the bottom of the sea!"
"I don't!" replied Dick. "My mac's worn out, and I shan't get another this side of Christmas. Here's Macdonald coming; don't eat him."
"I say, Hartland," began Alec, who was as red as a turkey-cock, "I'm awfully sorry you didn't get the 'Gayton.' I know from what the Angel has said that you've had jolly hard lines."
"Thanks!" growled Jim. "But I wonder you aren't afraid to be seen speaking to me."
"I wish you didn't feel so cut up about it," returned Macdonald, ignoring Jim's surliness. "You're looking at it through magnifying glasses."
Unfortunately Jim did feel cut up, and by continual brooding made himself more and more miserable. From this time, I fear, he began to go slowly down hill, and the only gleam of good feeling he displayed was with regard to his mother and Susie.
"I'm very sorry, my boy," said his mother, when he told her; "and yet I shall never think of this scholarship without feeling proud of you. I know you had a good chance of winning it, and threw it away for the sake of helping me."
"No, no, mother," cried the boy cheerfully; "you mustn't look at it that way. I mightn't have won the scholarship at all; and anyhow, I couldn't have accepted it."
On Sunday, when at the hospital, he talked to Susie much in the same way, making light of his disappointment so successfully that the girl was quite deceived.
At school, however, he was very different, becoming surly and morose, and making enemies of the boys who would willingly have remained his friends.