The referee waved his hand.
"Sheen wins," he said.
And that was the greatest moment of his life.
XXIII
A SURPRISE FOR SEYMOUR'S
Seymour's house took in one copy of the Sportsman daily. On the morning after the Aldershot competition Linton met the paper-boy at the door on his return from the fives courts, where he had been playing a couple of before-breakfast games with Dunstable. He relieved him of the house copy, and opened it to see how the Wrykyn pair had performed in the gymnastics. He did not expect anything great, having a rooted contempt for both experts, who were small and, except in the gymnasium, obscure. Indeed, he had gone so far on the previous day as to express a hope that Biddle, the more despicable of the two, would fall off the horizontal bar and break his neck. Still he might as well see where they had come out. After all, with all their faults, they were human beings like himself, and Wrykinians.
The competition was reported in the Boxing column. The first thing that caught his eye was the name of the school among the headlines. "Honours", said the headline, "for St Paul's, Harrow, and Wrykyn".
"Hullo," said Linton, "what's all this?"
Then the thing came on him with nothing to soften the shock. He had folded the paper, and the last words on the half uppermost were, "Final. Sheen beat Peteiro".
Linton had often read novels in which some important document "swam before the eyes" of the hero or the heroine; but he had never understood the full meaning of the phrase until he read those words, "Sheen beat Peteiro".
There was no mistake about it. There the thing was. It was impossible for the Sportsman to have been hoaxed. No, the incredible, outrageous fact must be faced. Sheen had been down to Aldershot and won a silver medal! Sheen! Sheen!! Sheen who had—who was—well, who, in a word, was SHEEN!!!