Rome, the mother
city; the other outhouses are merely provinces of ours. Jolly good of us
to let them use our buildings at all. Come and change; we have done a
good deed, my friends."

But the matter did not end there. That evening in Buller's dormitories
Hazlitt told a story of how Caruthers had been bullying him for no
reason, and hacking him till he could hardly sit down. He left out
Lovelace's name, because Lovelace was popular with the Buller's crowd.
News of this reached Felston, the second prefect. He fumed with rage,
and sought Gregory, the Buller's house captain.

"Have you heard the latest? That swine Caruthers has been bullying
Hazlitt. He drove him all round the cloisters, hitting him with a hockey
stick."

"Good God, the swine! Did he really! My word, I'll lay him out in the
Three Cock. You wait, that's all. When he plays in the Three Cock, I'll
lay him out for dead in the first ten minutes."

In due course this story found its way to the Buller's day-room, where
was great rejoicing. So Caruthers was going to be laid out, was he? How
damned funny! Hazlitt's heart leapt within him. His evil little mind
pictured Gordon being carried off the field, absolutely smashed up. He
gloated.

Gordon laughed when he heard of it.

"Oh, well, at any rate I shall have my shot at them first in the Thirds
and Two Cock."

He was secretly rather pleased to see that even his enemies had not the
slightest doubt about his getting a place in the Three Cock. A House cap
was just then his great ambition. But for all that he suffered
considerable annoyance. Whenever he went up to the tuck-shop a voice
from the Buller's doorway croaked: "Wait for the Three Cock!"

At first it was rather amusing. But soon it got distinctly tiresome.
Deep in his heart he cursed the tick Hazlitt and the whole Buller crowd.
A joke could be carried to an extreme. And it slowly dawned on him that,
if he did play in the Three Cock, he was in for a remarkably thin time.

Almost the last words he heard as the eight-forty swept out of Fernhurst
station on the last morning, with its waving hands and shoutings, was a
shriek from the Buller's day-room: "Wait for the Three Cock!" Gordon
laughed for a second, and then looked bored. The jest had ceased to have
a shred of humour left upon it. It was naked and ought to be ashamed.

The Easter term opened in the conventional way with rain, slush and
influenza. The fields were flooded, the country a lake; th