"Oh, I could be much higher in the school," exclaimed Plunger, blushing to the roots of the "wiry thatch"; "but I don't like the boys in the upper Forms, you know. They put too much side on for me."
"You look a modest, retiring kind of fellow. That's the reason the Mystic Brethren have taken such a fancy to thee."
Down came the bladders on Plunger's back as tokens of brotherly affection. Plunger felt flattered at this testimony of the brethren to his virtues, but he wished at the same time they had expressed it in some other way.
"It's very kind of you," he gasped.
"Though thou dost despise the bounders of the Upper Form, peradventure thou wouldst not mind taking a small present from the Mystic Brethren of the Fifth?"
"A present?" repeated Plunger, pricking up his ears. "Not at all. Shall be delighted to make myself useful."
"Let me see. The head boy of the Fifth is one named Hasluck, is he not, wearer of goggles?"
"Yes."
"Is there not also in that same Form one named Leveson, famous timekeeper, owner of a stop-watch?"
Plunger nodded, marvelling at the accuracy of the brethren's information. At a sign from Mellor, one of the masks, who was no other than Crick, left the circle, and brought from the corner of the shed a long parcel, wrapped in American leather-cloth—a facsimile, in fact, of the parcel which Paul had received from Wyndham a little earlier.