something which somebody else obviously values
very much; and when it was observed by members of his form that Adair
was going to great trouble and inconvenience to secure a place in the
form eleven or fifteen, they naturally began to think, too, that it
was worth being in those teams. The consequence was that his form
always played hard. This made other forms play hard. And the net
result was that, when Adair succeeded to the captaincy of football
and cricket in the same year, Sedleigh, as Mr. Downing, Adair's
house-master and the nearest approach to a cricket-master that
Sedleigh possessed, had a fondness for saying, was a keen school.
As a whole, it both worked and played with energy.

All it wanted now was opportunity.

This Adair was determined to give it. He had that passionate fondness
for his school which every boy is popularly supposed to have, but
which really is implanted in about one in every thousand. The average
public-school boy _likes_ his school. He hopes it will lick
Bedford at footer and Malvern at cricket, but he rather bets it won't.
He is sorry to leave, and he likes going back at the end of the
holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he
would think it rather bad form than otherwise. If anybody came up to
him, slapped him on the back, and cried, "Come along, Jenkins, my boy!
Play up for the old school, Jenkins! The dear old school! The old
place you love so!" he would feel seriously ill.

Adair was the exception.

To Adair, Sedleigh was almost a religion. Both his parents were dead;
his guardian, with whom he spent the holidays, was a man with
neuralgia at one end of him and gout at the other; and the only really
pleasant times Adair had had, as far back as he could remember, he
owed to Sedleigh. The place had grown on him, absorbed him. Where
Mike, violently transplanted from Wrykyn, saw only a wretched little
hole not to be mentioned in the same breath with Wrykyn, Adair,
dreaming of the future, saw a colossal establishment, a public school
among public schools, a lump of human radium, shooting out Blues and
Balliol Scholars year after year without ceasing.

It would not be so till long after he was gone and forgotten, but he
did not mind that. His devotion to Sedleigh was purely unselfish. He
did not want fame. All he worked for was that the school should grow
and grow, keener and better at games and more prosperous year by year,
till it should take its rank amo