nt hush,
checked himself, and in one peerless spring breasted the shoulders of
the back to come thudding down upon the turf with a glorious try.

Now the game swayed desperately, and with Alan ever beside him Michael
lived through every heroic fight of man. They were at Thermopylae,
stemming the Persian charges with hack and thrust and sweeping cut; they
were at Platea with Aristides and Pausanias, vowing death rather than
subjugation; the body of Terry beneath a weight of Modern forwards,
crying, "Let me up, you stinkers!" was fought for as long ago beneath
the walls of Troy the battle raged about the body of Patroclus. And when
the game was over, when the Moderns had been defeated for the first time
in four resentful years of scientific domination, when the Classical
Fifteen proudly strode from the field, immortal in muddied Tyrian, it
was easy enough to walk across the gravel arm-in-arm with Alan and,
while still the noise of the contest and the cries of the onlookers
echoed in their ears, it was easy to span the icy floes of two drifting
years in one moment of careless, artless intercourse.

"You'll get your Second Fifteen colours," said Alan confidently.

"Not this year," Michael thought.

"You'll get your Third Fifteen cap for a snip."

"Yes, I ought to get that," Michael agreed.

"Well, that's damned good, considering you haven't played for two
years," Alan vowed.

And as he spoke Michael wondered if Alan had ever wished for his company
in the many stressful games from which he had been absent.

Michael now became one of that group of happy immortals in the
entrance-hall, whose attitudes of noble ease graced the hot-water pipes
below the 'board' on which the news of the school fluctuated daily. This
society, to which nothing gave admission but a profound sense of one's
own right to enter it, varied from time to time only in details. As a
whole composition it was immutable, as permanent, as decorative and as
appropriate as the frieze of the Parthenon. From twenty minutes past
nine until twenty-seven minutes past nine, from twenty-five minutes past
eleven until twenty-eight minutes past eleven, from ten minutes to three
until two minutes to three the heroes of the school met in a large
familiarity whose Olympian laughter awed the fearful small boy that
flitted uneasily past and chilled the slouching senior that rashly
paused to examine the notices in assertion of an unearned right. Even
masters entering th