“Old Mansfield, my guide and philosopher, otherwise bear-leader,” responded Usk promptly. “He is supposed to be preparing me for Trinity, and looking after my morals and manners by the way.”
“I fear, Mr Mansfield, that you have rather an arduous task?”
“I must admit, your Excellency, that Usk is a lazy beggar, but his people are set on his passing well, and I am doing my best to get him through.”
“You old fraud!” cried Usk. “Don’t believe him, Uncle Cyril. He has deluded my guileless parents into thinking him a kind of Admirable Crichton, whereas in reality he couldn’t get me into Trinity to save his life. The fact is, he wanted a trip abroad, so he pretended a willingness to take a ‘pup.’ I wanted the same thing, so I made out that I needed a coach, and our extremes met. We have been loafing about Asia Minor and Constantinople for nearly two months, and never done a stroke of work except when our consciences were stirred by trustful letters from home.”
“Really, your Excellency, it is not quite so bad as that——” protested Mansfield, but his pupil interrupted him.
“No, it isn’t. I was forgetting the plains of Troy. When we camped there, Uncle Cyril, I said that we ought simply to let the atmosphere soak in and have its full effect, while we gassed about the decadence of the Turkish Empire, or anything else that was as far removed as possible from the associations of the spot; but this fellow would insist—and it was perfectly spontaneous, too—on our going all over the place with the ‘Iliad’ and trying to realise the whole thing.”
“Rather a new idea,” remarked Cyril, “to utilise the site of Troy as part-preparation for an exam. But all this doesn’t explain my catching you talking politics to a shopkeeper in the street at Bellaviste.”
“Oh, the Governor told us on no account to invade Thracia, lest we should be suspected of revolutionary designs, but we couldn’t resist having a little turn when the train made such a long stay. And how do you know that we were talking politics, uncle?”
“I know the symptoms. You were discussing me. Well, I won’t ask you what you learned on that interesting subject. You see, of course, why I pretended not to know who you were when I sent for you.”
“Lest the Thracians should spot something suspicious in our being in the country?”