road. I might have spoken of one or two
moral agents which prevent our schools from being altogether despicable:
unquestioning obedience to authority, for instance, or loyalty to
tradition. I might have told of characters moulded and fibres stiffened
by responsibility--our race bears more responsibility on its shoulders
than all the rest of the world put together--or of minds trained to
interpret laws and balance justice in the small but exacting world of
the prefects' meeting and the games' committee. But it was Gerald, who
is no moralist, but a youth of sound common-sense, who closed the
argument.

"Mr Fordyce," he said, "it's no use _my_ jawing to you, because you can
knock me flat at that game; and of course old Moke there"--this was
Master Donkin's unhappy but inevitable designation among his
friends--"is too thick to argue with a stuffed rabbit; but you had
better come down some time and see the place--that's all."

Robin promised to suspend judgment pending a personal investigation, and
the incident closed.

Gerald's verdict on Robin's views, communicated to me privately
afterwards, was characteristic but not unfavourable.

"He seems to have perfectly putrid notions about some things, but he's a
pretty sound chap on the whole--the best secretary you have had, anyhow,
old man. Have you seen him do a straight-arm balance on the
billiard-table?"

But I did not fully realise how completely Robin had settled down as an
accepted member of my household until one afternoon towards the end of
the Christmas holidays.

There is a small but snug apartment opening out of my library, through
an arched and curtained doorway. The library is regarded as my
workroom--impregnable, inviolable; not to be rudely attempted by
devastating housemaids. There is a sort of tacit agreement between Kitty
and myself as regards this apartment. Fatima-like, she may do what she
pleases with the rest of the house. She may indulge her passion for
drawing-room meetings to its fullest extent. She may intertain
missionaries in the attics and hold meetings of the Dorcas Society in
the basement. She may give reformed burglars the run of the
silver-closet, and allow curates and chorus-girls to mingle in sweet
companionship on the staircase. But she must leave the library alone,
and neither she nor her following must overflow through its double doors
during what I call business hours.

On this particular afternoon I had been engaged upon the draf