I won no prize that year. Oddly enough, Dan did, for arithmetic; the only subject studied in the Lower Fourth that interested him. He liked to see things coming right, he explained.
My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me himself.
“It's very curious, Paul,” he said, “you seem to know a good deal.”
“They asked me all the things I didn't know. They seemed to do it on purpose,” I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father crossed the room and sat down beside me.
“Spud!” he said—it was a long time since he had called me by that childish nickname—“perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the unlucky ones.”
“Are you unlucky?” I asked.
“Invariably,” answered my father, rumpling his hair. “I don't know why. I try hard—I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It always does.”
“But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune,” I said, looking up in surprise. “We're getting on, aren't we?”
“I have thought so before, so often,” said my father, “and it has always ended in a—in a collapse.”
I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.