Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/52

 summer, and there was no more school until five o'clock. Nor did it require the menaces of Shockley to induce the new pair to turn round and accompany the rest; but their first game of cricket was not a happy experience for either boy. Cave major, who was in the Eleven, was better employed among his peers on the Upper. Loder, who was no cricketer, picked up with a certain Shears major, who was not much of one. Nobody took the game in the least seriously except a bowler off whom the unlucky Carpenter managed to miss two catches. The two new men were chosen last on either side. They failed to make a run between them, and of course had no opportunity of showing whether they could bowl. Both were depressed when it was all over.

"It served me right for dropping those catches," said Carpenter, however, with the stoicism of a true cricketer at heart.

"I only wish it was last term instead of this!" muttered Jan.

There was another thing that disappointed both boys. The Lodge happened to be playing a similar game on an adjacent pitch. But Devereux was not among the players, and Carpenter heard somebody say that he was not coming back till half-term. Jan's heart jumped when he heard it in his turn: by half-term he would have settled down, by half-term many things might have happened. Yet the deferred meeting was still fraught in his mind with opposite possibilities, that swung to either extreme on the pendulum of his mood; and on the whole he would have been glad to get it over. At one moment this half-term's grace was a keen relief to him; at another, a keener disappointment.