"Yes, but it's a good wholesome rule that if a fellow can't take his own line he'd better adapt himself to the lines of others. Eh?"

Haviland did not reply. He merely smiled, cynically, disdainfully. Mr Sefton, watching his face, was interested, and more sorry for him than his official position allowed him to say. He went on:--

"Don't mope. There's nothing to be gained by it. Throw yourself into something. If one has lost a position, it is always possible to regain it. I know, and some others know, your influence has always been used in the right direction. Do you think that counts for nothing? Eh?"

"It hasn't counted for much, sir, in a certain quarter," was the bitter reply. "It isn't the position I mind--I don't care a hang about it, sir!" he burst forth pa.s.sionately, "but to be stuck down in these three beastly fields, in the middle of a crowd all day and every day--I'd rather have been expelled at once."

"Don't be an a.s.s, Haviland," said the master, stopping short--for they had been walking up and down--and peering at him in his quaint way. "Do you hear? Don't be an a.s.s."

This commentary, uttered as it was, left no room for reply, wherefore Haviland said nothing.

"Why don't you go to the Doctor and ask him to remove your 'gates'?"

went on Mr Sefton.

"I wouldn't ask _him_ anything, sir."

The tone, the expression of hatred and vindictiveness in the young fellow's face, almost startled the other. As a master, ought he not to administer a stern rebuke; as a clergyman, was it not his duty to reason with him? But Mr Sefton, no part of an a.s.s himself, decided that this was not the time for doing anything of the sort.

"You talk about not caring if you were expelled, Haviland," he went on.

"How about looking at it from your father's point of view? How would he feel, d'you think, if you ended up your school life with expulsion?

Eh?"

He had struck the right chord there, for in the course of their conversations he had gathered that the young fellow was devotedly attached to his father, whom he regarded as about a hundred times too good for the barren, ungrateful, and ill-requited service to which he had devoted his life--at any rate, looking at it from the unregenerate and worldly point of view. And, with a consciousness of having said just the right thing at the right time, Mr Sefton wisely decided to say no more.

"Think it over, Haviland. Think it over. D'you hear?" and with a friendly nod of farewell, he went his way.

A few minutes later he was walking along a field-path, his hat on the back of his head as usual, and swinging his stick. With him was Mr Williams.

"I've just been talking to that fellow Haviland," he was saying. "Of course, I didn't tell him so, but Nick has made a blunder this time.

He's piled it on to him too thick."

The Doctor's _sobriquet_, you see, had got among the a.s.sistant masters.

It was short and handy, and so among themselves they used it--some of them, at any rate.

"I think he's been most infernally rough on him, if you ask me," replied Mr Williams, who, by the way, was not in orders, but an athletic Oxford graduate of sporting tastes, and who was generally to be met when off the grounds surrounded by three or four dogs, and puffing at a briar-root pipe. This he was even now engaged in relighting. "One would think it'd be enough to kick the poor devil out of his prefectship without gating him for the rest of the term into the bargain. I promptly let him off the lines I'd given him when I heard of it."

"That's just my opinion, Williams. And it's the gating that's making him desperate. And he is getting desperate, too. I shouldn't be surprised if he did something reckless."

"Then he'll get the chuck. That'll be the last straw. Why has Nick got such a down on him, eh, Sefton?"

"I don't know, mind, but perhaps I can guess," said the other, enigmatically. "But look here, Williams. Supposing we put in a word for him to Nick. Get him to take off the fellow's gates, at any rate?

Eh? Clay would join, and so would Jackson, in feet we all would."

"That'd make it worse. Nick would think we were all in league against him. He isn't going back one jot or t.i.ttle on his infallible judgment, so don't you believe it. We'd get properly snubbed for our pains."

"Well, I'm going to tackle him, anyhow. I'm not afraid of Nick for all his absurd pomposity," rejoined Mr Sefton, with something like a snort of defiance, and his nose in the air. He meant it, too. Yet, although the above expression of opinion between these two masters very fairly represented the general estimate in which the whole body held the Head, they were fully alive to the latter's good points, and supported him loyally in upholding the discipline and traditions of the school.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

A MIDNIGHT FORAY.

There was one in whose eyes Haviland, fallen from his pedestal, was on a still higher plane even than he had been before; and that one was Mpukuza, otherwise Anthony, sneeringly known among the ill-disposed as "Haviland's chum." With the entire and unswerving loyalty of his race towards the object of its hero-worship, the Zulu boy looked upon his G.o.d's misfortune as his own misfortune, and was not slow to proclaim the fact in season and out of season. Any fellow within measurable dimensions of his own size who professed satisfaction within Cetchy's hearing had got to fight, while more than one thrashing came his way from bigger fellows, towards whom his championing of his hero's cause took, perforce, the form of cheek. As for the prime author of the said misfortune, it would have been astonishing to note the result upon the reverend but stern Doctor's mind, could he either have heard or understood the awful threats and imprecations muttered at him in the liquid Zulu language whenever he came within view of Anthony.

The latter, since he had been at Saint Kirwin's, had made his way very fairly well. Acting upon an earnest and wise warning from the missionary who had placed him there, the masters had refrained from taking undue notice of him, and so spoiling him, as perhaps might otherwise have been the case, and being thus left to make his own way, he had made it, as we have said. And he was growing taller and stronger, with all the fine physique of his race. Lithe, active, enduring, he was as hard as steel; nor would it be very long before he might be in a condition to turn the tables on Jarnley and Co., quite independently of his hero and protector.

To whom one day he sidled up, and opened conversation this way:

"You not sick of being always in?"

"You a.s.s, Cetchy! What d'you mean by asking such an idiotic question?"

was the excusably irritable retort.

"_Au_! Then why you not go out?"

"Look here, Cetchy. If you're trying to make a fool of me, you'll promptly find you've got the wrong pig by the ear. What are you driving at? Eh?"

The other looked quickly around. The two were alone.

"I not make fool. _Ishinga 'nkulu_ not let you go out in day. _Au_! go out at night. Why not?"

We regret to say that by the above epithet--which being interpreted means "big rascal"--this descendant of generations of fighting savages was of late wont to refer to the Reverend the Headmaster of Saint Kirwin's.

"No one see you," he went on. "Quite easy. I go with you; we find lots of nests. We go to Hangman's Wood again. Plenty of time. All night long."

"Now, Cetchy, you young a.s.s, how are you going to find nests in the dark?"

"Not dark. Plenty moon. Besides," and here he looked round once more, and said something in a quick, hurried whisper. Haviland started, and his face flushed red with eagerness and excitement.

"The very thing," he exclaimed. "By George, won't we have fun? But I'm not so sure about the other fellows in the room. Some of them hated me while I was a prefect. What if they sneak?"

"They not sneak," tranquilly replied the other. "No; they not sneak. I know."

Then the two plotters put their heads together and talked a good while, but always cautiously. If any one came within earshot, why they were only talking about bird-nesting.

We said that Haviland occupied a smaller room at the end of the big dormitory, the said room containing ten other fellows, and from this it had not been deemed necessary to shift him at the time of his suspension; indeed, the same order prevailed therein as before, so great the force of habit and his own prestige. Now, a night or two after the above conversation, just before "lights out" time, Haviland remarked meaningly:

"Any sneaks here?"

The boys stared, then t.i.ttered. What on earth was Haviland driving at?

they were all thinking.

"Don't stand grinning like a Cheshire cat, Smithson, you young ape,"

said the ex-prefect. "Why don't you answer, all of you? Are there any sneaks here?"

"No," came the unanimous answer; while one or two added, "Of course not.

Why?"