At the bottom of the staircase, Duffield was comfortably lounging.
“Hullo, kids!” he said, “you’ve got down then? What a mess you’re in! Mansfield wants you, Heathcote.”
And the messenger departed, whistling a cheery tune, and dribbling Coote’s cap, after the straightest rules of the Association, across the Quad before him.
Heathcote’s face lengthened. This was the triumphal reception which was to greet him on his return to earth, the mention of which was to set Dick’s teeth gnashing!
He walked sulkily to Mansfield’s study, and knew his fate almost before he entered the room.
The Captain was stern and cutting. He wasted few words in inquiry, still fewer in expostulation.
“You’re one of the boys it’s no use talking to,” he said, almost scornfully. “You’ll be glad to hear I’m not going to talk to you. I’m going to thrash you.”
And that beautiful holiday morning George Heathcote was thrashed in a manner which hurt and startled him.
He fled from the Captain’s presence, sore both in body and mind. But, strange to say, his chief wrath was reserved not for the Captain, but for Dick. His mind, once poisoned, contrived to connect Dick with every calamity that came upon him. And it enraged him to think that at this moment, while he was smarting under the penalty of a straightforward honest breach of rules, inflicted by a senior whose chief quarrel with him was that he had had the pluck to stay away from levée, Dick was reaping the benefit of his toadyism and basking in the sunshine of the powers that were.
Pledge, as might be expected, did nothing to discourage this feeling. He was not a bit surprised. He had expected it, and he knew equally well it was but the beginning of a settled programme. Heathcote had better not keep up the contest. He had better knuckle under at once, as Dick had done, and enjoy a quiet time. Or, if he must break rules, let him remember that fellows could lie, and cheat, and sneak in Templeton, and never once be interfered with by the holy monitors; but when once they took to walking on the roofs—why, where could they expect to go to when they descended to such a depth of wickedness as that?