ocking us out."

II

SHEEN AT HOME

On the afternoon following the Oxford A match, Sheen, of Seymour's, was
sitting over the gas-stove in his study with a Thucydides. He had been
staying in that day with a cold. He was always staying in. Everyone has
his hobby. That was Sheen's.

Nobody at Wrykyn, even at Seymour's, seemed to know Sheen very well,
with the exception of Drummond; and those who troubled to think about
the matter at all rather wondered what Drummond saw in him. To the
superficial observer the two had nothing in common. Drummond was good
at games--he was in the first fifteen and the second eleven, and had
won the Feather Weights at Aldershot--and seemed to have no interests
outside them. Sheen, on the other hand, played fives for the house, and
that was all. He was bad at cricket, and had given up football by
special arrangement with Allardyce, on the plea that he wanted all his
time for work. He was in for an in-school scholarship, the Gotford.
Allardyce, though professing small sympathy with such a degraded
ambition, had given him a special dispensation, and since then Sheen
had retired from public life even more than he had done hitherto. The
examination for the Gotford was to come off towards the end of the
term.

The only other Wrykinians with whom Sheen was known to be friendly were
Stanning and Attell, of Appleby's. And here those who troubled to think
about it wondered still more, for Sheen, whatever his other demerits,
was not of the type of Stanning and Attell. There are certain members
of every public school, just as there are certain members of every
college at the universities, who are "marked men". They have never been
detected in any glaring breach of the rules, and their manner towards
the powers that be is, as a rule, suave, even deferential. Yet it is
one of the things which everybody knows, that they are in the black
books of the authorities, and that sooner or later, in the picturesque
phrase of the New Yorker, they will "get it in the neck". To this class
Stanning and Attell belonged. It was plain to all that the former was
the leading member of the firm. A glance at the latter was enough to
show that, whatever ambitions he may have had in the direction of
villainy, he had not the brains necessary for really satisfactory
evildoing. As for Stanning, he pursued an even course of life, always
rigidly obeying the eleventh commandment, "thou shalt not be found
out". This kept