k,
unemphasised voice, with the break of a laugh in it, had precisely the
same disturbing effect on both.

"Well," Urquhart was saying, "when will they let you play again? You must
buck up and get all right quickly.... I shouldn't wonder if you made a
pretty decent three-quarter sometime.... You ought to use your arm as
soon as you can, you know, or it gets stiff, and then you can't, and
that's an awful bore.... Hurt like anything when I hauled it in, didn't
it? But it was much better to do it at once."

"Oh, much," Peter agreed.

"How does it feel now?"

"Oh, all right. I don't feel it much. I say, do you think I ought to use
it at once, in case it gets stiff?" Peter's eyes were a little anxious;
he didn't much want to use it at once.

But Urquhart opined that this would be over-great haste. He departed, and
his last words were, "You must come to breakfast with me when you're up
again."

Peter lay, glorified, and thought it all over. Urquhart knew, then; he
had known from the first. He had known when he said, "I say, you,
Margerison, just cut down to the field ..."

Not for a moment did it seem at all strange to Peter that Urquhart should
have had this knowledge and given no sign till now. What, after all, was
it to a hero that the family circle of an obscure individual such as he
should have momentarily intersected the hero's own orbit? School has this
distinction--families take a back place; one is judged on one's own
individual merits. Peter would much rather think that Urquhart had come
to see him because he had put his arm out and Urquhart had put it in
(really though, only temporarily in) than because his mother had once
been Urquhart's stepmother.

Peter's arm did not recover so soon as Urquhart's sanguineness had
predicted. Perhaps he began taking precautions against stiffness too
soon; anyhow he did not that term make a decent three-quarter, or any
sort of a three-quarter at all. It always took Peter a long time to get
well of things; he was easy to break and hard to mend--made in Germany,
as he was frequently told. So cheaply made was he that he could perform
nothing. Defeated dreams lived in his eyes; but to light them there
burned perpetually the blue and luminous lamps of undefeated mirth, and
also an immense friendliness for life and mankind and the delightful
world. Like the young knight Agenore, Peter the unlucky was of a mind
having no limits of hope. Over the blue and friendly eyes that lit