Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily scribbling a letter to her son in which the delicate health, timid disposition and other inevitable attributes of the new boy were brought to his notice, and commanded to his care. When she had sealed and stamped the envelope Henry uttered a belated caution.
“Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the boy to Comus. He doesn’t always respond to directions you know.”
Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother’s opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean unspoiled penny stamp is probably yet unborn.
CHAPTER II
Lancelot Chetrof stood at the end of a long bare passage, restlessly consulting his watch and fervently wishing himself half an hour older with a certain painful experience already registered in the past; unfortunately it still belonged to the future, and what was still more horrible, to the immediate future. Like many boys new to a school he had cultivated an unhealthy passion for obeying rules and requirements, and his zeal in this direction had proved his undoing. In his hurry to be doing two or three estimable things at once he had omitted to study the notice-board in more than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a football practice specially ordained for newly-joined boys. His fellow juniors of a term’s longer standing had graphically enlightened him as to the inevitable consequences of his lapse; the dread which attaches to the unknown was, at any rate, deleted from his approaching doom, though at the moment he felt scarcely grateful for the knowledge placed at his disposal with such lavish solicitude.
“You’ll get six of the very best, over the back of a chair,” said one.
“They’ll draw a chalk line across you, of course you know,” said another.
“A chalk line?”
“Rather. So that every cut can be aimed exactly at the same spot. It hurts much more that way.”
Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an element of exaggeration in this uncomfortably realistic description.