Loring smiled round the company, turned in his seat and composed himself for slumber. O'Rane looked with interest and a shade of defiance from one face to another.
II
The first few days of the school year were always a busy time for the seniors. Matheson, a mild-eyed mathematician in Holy Orders, with a family defying even his powers of enumeration, observed the wholesome principle of leaving the monitors to take care of his house—a task which, I can say after six years' experience, one generation after another performed with efficiency, justice and a sense of responsibility. His official duties, so far as we could see, were confined to carving the joints at luncheon, giving leave-out, wandering in a transient, embarrassed fashion round Hall when the monitors were taking prep., and scrawling his endorsement of his colleagues' scurrility and invective at the foot of the monthly reports.
When not in form nor engaged in one or other of these functions, he retired to a faded study and struggled with the weekly acrostic in "Vanity Fair." Once each season, when the Cup Team had successfully challenged all comers for possession of the shield, Matheson would emerge dazedly from the half-light, summon the house to a supper in Hall, and after a prodigal distribution of steak-and-kidney pie, ham, tongue, cold fowl, brawn, jelly, meringues, jam roll, lemonade and diluted claret-cup, hold forth with shining eyes and throbbing voice on the glories of British Sport and the umbilical connection between the playing fields of Eton and the battle of Waterloo. It was always a tour-de-force of simple-minded sincerity; he spoke as one whose heart was stirred to its depths by the growing glories of his house. And we cheered encouragingly and thought the better of him for it.
There was little opportunity of making O'Rane's path smooth in the early days. At Loring's orders and in accordance with the immemorial "Substance and Shadow" institution, O'Rane was set at the feet of a senior fag, by name Mayhew, with instructions to learn all that was to be learned during his days of sanctuary. For a fortnight no master could send him to Detention School nor give him lines; he could dodge every practice game on Little End, wear button boots, break bounds, refuse to fag, cut roll-call, or talk in prep. with complete physical impunity. At the end of the second week he had theoretically tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Ignorance of rules could no longer be pleaded in extenuation of their breach, and justice went untempered by mercy, save in that no boy could be thrashed twice in ten days without written authorization from his housemaster or the Head.
On the last evening of grace I was seated in Loring's study after prep. when Mayhew came in with the cocoa saucepan and cups.
"Does O'Rane know the rules now?" Loring asked. "I haven't seen him on Little End so far."
"I think I've told him everything," Mayhew answered.
"Has he got his footer change yet?"
Mayhew hesitated in some embarrassment.