“What do you mean?” inquired Heathcote, looking up.
“I mean that Mansfield is picking his men for the 3rd Football Fifteen, and I’m afraid you won’t be in it, my boy.”
Heathcote said nothing, but walked on to the school door where he and his patron parted company; the latter proceeding to his study with a particularly amiable smile on his countenance; the former repairing to the adjourned meeting of the “Select Sociables,” there to hear high praises of his loyalty and steadfastness, and to partake of a very select contraband supper, which, with the questionable festivities that followed, was good for neither the body nor the soul of our unheroic young hero.
Chapter Eighteen.
Dick conspires to defeat the ends of Justice.
Dick, on quitting the Captain’s levée, retired in anything but exalted spirits to Cresswell’s study.
He didn’t care to face the Den that evening. Not that he was afraid of Rule 5, or cared a snap what anybody there had to say about his conduct. But he wasn’t sure himself whether he had made a mistake or not. He hated being in a corner. He had no natural antipathy to doing what was right, but he didn’t like being pinned down to it. He didn’t go to the levée because he was desperately in love with law and order, and it was a shame for any one to suppose he had. He went because he knew Heathcote was waiting to see what he did. And now, after all, Heathcote had deserted his colours and not gone.
It was enough to make any one testy, and Aspinall, had he known it, would have been less surprised than he was to have his head almost snapped off as the two fellow-fags sat at work in their senior’s study that evening.