ut
brute strength and a quick eye are the only requisites, but I am
quite convinced that if that fellow had been in the Redan that day,
he would have got the Victoria Cross, and I should not. There is no
doubt about his pluck, and if it had only been to put me in the
shade he would have performed some brilliant action or other that
would have got it for him. He is a better rider than I am, at any
rate a more reckless one, and he is a better shot, too. He is
incomparably more clever."

"I cannot believe it, Captain Mallett."

"It is quite true, Bertha, and to add to it all, he is a remarkably
handsome fellow, a first-rate talker, and when he pleases can make
himself wonderfully popular."

"He must be a perfect Crichton, Captain Mallett."

"The worst of it is, Bertha, although I am ashamed of myself for
thinking so, I have never been able to divest myself of the idea
that he did not play fair. There were two or three queer things
that happened at school in which he was always suspected of having
had a hand, though it was never proved. I was always convinced that
he used cribs, and partly owed his place to them. I was jealous
enough to believe that the Latin verses he sent in were written for
him by Rigby, who was one of the monitors, and a great dab at
verses. Rigby was a great chum of his, for he was a mean fellow,
and my rival was always well supplied with money, and to do him
justice, liberal with it.

"Then, just before we left school, he carried off the prize in
swimming. He was a good swimmer, but I was a better. I thought
myself for once certain to beat him, but an hour before the race I
got frightful cramps, a thing that I never had before or since, and
I could hardly make a fight at all. I thought at the time, and I
have thought since, that I must have taken something at breakfast
that disagreed with me horribly, and that he somehow put it in my
tea.

"Then again in that matter of the Sculls at Henley. I never felt my
boat row so heavily as it did then. When it was taken out of the
water it was found that a piece of curved iron hoop was fixed to
the bottom by a nail that had been pushed through the thin skin. It
certainly was not there when it was on the rack, but it was there
when I rowed back to the boathouse, and it could only have got
there by being put on as the boat was being lowered into the water.
There were three or four men helping to lower her down--two of them
friends of mine, two of them fe