Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/23

 got down to the Middle Fourth when suddenly his breath was taken as by a blow.

Heriot came in to find a face paler than it had looked downstairs, but a good brown arm and hand lying out over the coverlet, and a Midsummer List tightly clutched. The muscles of the arm were unusually developed for so young a boy. Heriot saw them relax under his gaze as he stood over the bed.

"Got hold of a school list, have you?"

"Yessir," said Rutter with a slurring alacrity that certainly did not savour of the schoolroom. Heriot turned away before he could wince; but unluckily his eyes fell on the floor, strewn with the litter of the new boy's clothes.

"I like the way you fold your clothes!" he laughed.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but where am I to put them?"

It was refreshingly polite; but, again, the begging-pardon opening was not the politeness of a schoolboy.

"On this chair," said Heriot, suiting the action to the word. The boy would have leapt out of bed to do it himself. His shyness not only prevented him, but rendered him incapable of protest or acknowledgment; and the next moment he had something to be shy about. Mr. Heriot was holding up a broad and dirty belt, and without thinking he had cried, "What's this?"

Rutter could not answer for shame. And Heriot had time to think.

"I can sympathise," he said with a chuckle; "in the holidays I often wear one myself. But we mustn't betray each other, Rutter, or we shall never hear the last of it! I'll give you an order for a pair of braces in the morning."

"I have them, sir, thanks."

"That's right." Heriot was still handling the belt as