Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/17

 "That's a quality we appreciate; boys don't, unless there's prowess behind it. Carpenter talks cricket like a Lillywhite, but he doesn't look a cricketer. Rutter doesn't talk about it, but his tutor says he's a bit of a bowler. Carpenter beams because he's got to his public school at last. He has illusions to lose. Rutter knows nothing about us, and probably cares less; he's here under protest, you can see it in his face, and the chances are all in favour of his being pleasantly disappointed."

Heriot's quill was squeaking as he spoke, for he was a man with the faculty of doing and even thinking of more than one thing at a time; but though his sister continued mounting photographs in her album with extreme care, her mind was full of the two young boys who had come that night to live under their roof for good or ill. She wondered whether her brother was right in his ready estimate of their respective characters. She knew him for the expert that he was; these were not the first boys that she had heard him sum up as confidently on as brief an acquaintance; and though her knowledge had its obvious limitations, she had never known him wrong. He had a wonderfully fair mind. And yet the boy of action, in whom it was possible to stimulate thought, would always be nearer his heart than the thoughtful boy who might need goading into physical activity. She could not help feeling that he was prepared to take an unsympathetic view of the boy who had struck her as having more in him than most small boys; it was no less plain that his romantic history and previous disadvantages had already rendered the other newcomer an object of sympathetic interest in the house-master's eyes. The material was new as well as raw, and so doubly welcome to the workman's hand. Yet the workman's sister, who had so much of his own force and fairness in her nature, felt that she could