second boy wore a well-cut Eton suit, and sat in the smoking
compartment of a padded corridor carriage, with a silk-lined overcoat
beside him and a silver-mounted suit-case in the rack above. He was not
smoking, nor was he reading; but he sat on a great pile of papers and
magazines, and stared straight in front of him--that is to say, straight
at me.

His stare, though constant and unrelenting, was not in the least
offensive--it had no curiosity in it: he had obviously been
contemplating the cushions before I intruded, and since I had chosen to
occupy his field of vision he contemplated me.

I had no speaking acquaintance with the boy; but he bore the features of
his family, and his initials were on the suit-case above. So I knew him
for the only son of a man who had once shown me civility, the youngest
and least extravagantly wealthy of three rich brothers. Since one of
these brothers had never married and now was not likely to, it lay
beyond guessing what wealth the boy would inherit some day.

He was by no means ill-looking, and quite certainly no fool. His face
carried the stamp of his father's ability. It puzzled me what he could
be doing with that pile of papers and magazines; or why, having burdened
himself with them, he should choose to sit and stare instead of reading
them. For his station lay but a twenty minutes' run below mine, and it
was impossible that in the time he could have glanced through the half
of them.

He had been staring at me, or through me, maybe for half an hour, when
our train slowed down and came to a standstill above the steep valley
between Bodmin Road and Doublebois. After a couple of minutes' wait,
the boy rose and went to the window in the corridor to see what was
happening; and I took this opportunity to glance across at the papers
scattered on the vacant seat. They included three or four sixpenny and
threepenny magazines; a large illustrated paper (_Black and White_, I
think); half a dozen penny weeklies--_Tit-bits_, _Answers_, _Pearson's
Weekly_, _Cassell's Saturday Journal_; I forget what others: halfpenny
papers in a heap--all kinds of _Cuts_, _Snippets_, _Siftings_, _Echoes_,
_Snapshots_, and _Side-lights_; _Pars about People_, _Christian
Sweepings_, _Our Happy Fireside_, and _The Masher_. Many lay face
downward, coyly hiding their titles but disclosing such headlines as
"Facts about the Flag," "Books which have influenced the Bishop of
London," "He gave 'em Fits!