“The thing is, I can’t imagine who wrote it. You didn’t, did you?”
Dick laughed.
“Rather not. I don’t see the good of hole-in-the-corner ways of doing things like that.”
“Do you think Cresswell wrote it? He’s about the only senior that knows me, except Pledge.”
“I don’t fancy he did; it’s not his style,” said Dick, who seemed quite to have taken the whipper-in under his wing.
“He might know. I wonder, Dick, if you’d mind trying to find out? It maybe a trick, you know, after all.”
“Don’t look like it,” said Dick, glancing again at the letter. “It’s too like what everybody says about him.”
“That’s the worst of it. He’s hardly said a word to me since I’ve been his fag, and certainly nothing bad; and he writes my Latin verses for me, too. I fancy fellows are down on him too much.”
“Well,” said Dick, “I’ll try and pump Cresswell; but I wish to goodness, Georgie, you weren’t that beast’s fag.”
Every conversation he had on the subject, no matter with whom, ended in some such ejaculation, till Heathcote got quite used to it, and even ceased to be disturbed by it.