There was a silence.
“Above it, I suppose?”
“Not a bit. Not up to it. I shall want a lot of coaching at that end net of yours before I’m fit to play for Sedleigh.”
There was another pause.
“Then you won’t play?” asked Adair.
“I’m not keeping you, am I?” said Mike, politely.
It was remarkable what a number of members of Outwood’s house appeared to cherish a personal grudge against Mr. Downing. It had been that master’s somewhat injudicious practice for many years to treat his own house as a sort of Chosen People. Of all masters, the most unpopular is he who by the silent tribunal of a school is convicted of favouritism. And the dislike deepens if it is a house which he favours and not merely individuals. On occasions when boys in his own house and boys from other houses were accomplices and partners in wrong-doing, Mr. Downing distributed his thunderbolts unequally, and the school noticed it. The result was that not only he himself, but also—which was rather unfair—his house, too, had acquired a good deal of unpopularity.
The general consensus of opinion in Outwood’s during the luncheon interval was that, having got Downing’s up a tree, they would be fools not to make the most of the situation.
Barnes’s remark that he supposed, unless anything happened and wickets began to fall a bit faster, they had better think of declaring somewhere about half-past three or four, was met with a storm of opposition.
“Declare!” said Robinson. “Great Scott, what on earth are you talking about?”