“Was that all?” cried Whitney.
“Every word, sir. I should not have spoken at all but that I had known Mr. Carstairs before we came here. Mr. Richardson made a great deal of it, and gave it quite a different colouring.”
“Did Mr. Carstairs turn you away for that?” I asked of Charley; when he came back for the things, and the other two had gone out.
“Three or four days after it happened, sir, Mr. Carstairs stopped my waiting on him again. I think it was through Mr. Richardson. Mr. Carstairs had refused to go out with him the evening it occurred.”
“You knew Mr. Carstairs before he came to Oxford. Where was it?”
“It was——” he hesitated, and then went on. “It was at the school he was at in London, sir. I was a junior master there.”
Letting a plate fall—for I was helping to pack them, wanting the table—I stared at the fellow. “A master there and——” and a servant here, I all but said, but I stopped the words.
“Only one of the outer masters, attending daily,” he went on quietly. “I taught writing and arithmetic, and English to the juniors.”
“But how comes it that you are here in this post, Charley?”
“I had reasons for wishing to come to live at Oxford, sir.”