n it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days:
But such a heart whose pulse may be--
Thy praise."

Desmond stared at the graceful writing long after the train had passed
Totton. "Am I ungrateful?" he asked himself. "Not to them," he
muttered; "surely not to them." He recalled what Warde had said about
ingratitude being the unpardonable sin. Ah! it was loathsome,
ingratitude! And much had been given to him. How much? For the first
time he made, so to speak, an inventory of what he had received--his
innumerable blessings. _What had he given in return_? And now the
fine handwriting seemed blurred; he saw it through tears which he ought
to have shed. "Oh, my God," he murmured, "am I ungrateful?" The
question bit deeper into his mind, sinking from there into his soul.

When the School reassembled, a curious incident occurred. John
happened to be going up the fine flight of steps that leads to the Old
Schools. He was carrying some books and papers. Scaife, running down
the steps, charged into him. By great good fortune, no damage was done
except to a nicely-bound Sophocles. John, however, felt assured that
Scaife had deliberately intended to knock him down, seized, possibly,
by an ecstasy of blind rage not uncommon with him. Scaife smiled
derisively, and said--

"A thousand apologies, Verney."

"_One_ is enough," John replied, "if it is sincere."

They eyed each other steadily. John read a furious challenge in
Scaife's bold eyes--more, a menace, the threatening frown of power
thwarted. Scaife seemed to expand, to fill the horizon, to blot out
the glad sunshine. Once again the curious certainty gripped the
younger that Scaife was indeed the personification of evil, the more
malefic because it stalked abroad masked. For Scaife had outlived his
reputation as a breaker of the law. Since that terrible experience in
the Fourth Form Room, he had paid tithe of mint and cummin. As a Sixth
Form boy he upheld authority, laughing the while in his sleeve. He
knew, of course, that one mistake, one slip, would be fatal. And he
prided himself on not making mistakes. He gambled, but not with boys;
he drank, not with boys; he denied his body nothing it craved; but he
never forgot that expulsion from Harrow meant the loss of a commission
in a smart cavalry regiment. When it was intimated to him that the
Guards did not want his father's son, he laughed bitterly, and swore to
himself that h