‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I’m always doing that kind of thing.’ Then he looked at the straw hat and broad white collar which are the infallible marks of a boy at St. Anselm’s, and added, ‘I say, are you a new boy? So am I. Was that your governor? Whose house are you in? There’s no cab; those chaps have taken them all; we may as well walk up to the school together, eh? There’s time, isn’t there?’
Gerald Eversley made no attempt to answer the questions which came leaping from his companion’s lips, but contented himself with saying that he was a new boy, he had only once been at St. Anselm’s before, and then with walking quietly at his side. In his heart he could not help wondering how any boy, being new to public school life, could feel so much at his ease.
Both boys, it is needless now to say, were taking the fateful step—more fateful perhaps than any other that is taken in life—of entering a great public school. Their parents had brought them earlier in the day to be introduced to the master in whose house they were to be placed, and after the introduction they had been permitted to see the last of their parents at the station. They had never met before; they did not know each other’s names; it was only by such a chance as has been described that they came to be walking together. Who can tell at any moment of his life that for him there may not be some one coming from a distant home, drawn onwards by divine guiding, some one whose name he has not heard, and yet whose destiny is indissolubly linked to his own?
For two or three minutes they walked in silence; but it was not in Harry Venniker’s nature to be silent for long, and he soon began to interrogate his companion with the good-natured, but almost brutal, frankness which is exclusively characteristic of schoolboys.
‘I say,’ was his first remark, ‘what’s your name, though?’
‘Gerald Simeon Eversley,’ was the reply, delivered in a low tone, and with something not altogether unlike a choking of the throat.
It was not, perhaps, a remarkable name; but Mr. Eversley had called his son ‘Simeon’ after the great Evangelical leader whose funeral at King’s College in Cambridge he had himself, as a young man, attended.
‘Oh! Eversley, is it?’ The name did not appear to awaken any reminiscences in Harry Venniker’s mind.
‘Whose house are you in?’
‘Mr. Brandiston’s.’