h a touch of
seriousness about it, its arms hugging its knees, and looked beyond them
all and saw how much bigger and finer the joke was than they thought it.
She was the spirit of their good humour. They could not have done
without her.

And he, Robert Stonehouse, stood outside the circle, as in reality he had
always done. But now he did not want to belong. He knew now how it
hindered men to run with the herd--even to have friends. It wasted time
and strength. And these people were no good anyhow. Howard was one of
these dissipated duffers who later on would settle down as a miraculously
respectable and incapable G.P. The rest were vague, rattle-brained
eccentrics who would fizzle out, no one would know how or care.

Only Francey---- But even in the old days it was only because of
Francey that the Banditti had meant anything to him.

The head waiter pushed across the counter a jug of yellowish liquid in
which floated orange peel and a few tinned, dubious-looking cherries.

"Take it, for God's sake! People who want muck like that ought to keep
to Soho."

Robert poured out with an eye trained to accurate measurements in the
laboratory. It was his practice to do well everything that he had to do.
Otherwise you lost tone--you weakened your own fibre so that when the big
thing came along you slumped. But he could not forget Francey Wilmot's
nearness. It did not surprise him any more. But it charged him with
unrest, and he and his unrest frightened him. He knew how to master
ordinary emotion. Even when he carried off the Franklin Scholarship in
the teeth of a brilliant opposition he had not allowed himself a moment's
triumph. It was all in the day's work--a single step on the road which
he had mapped out deliberately. But this was outside his experience. It
had pounced on him from nowhere, shaking him.

He had to look up at her again. And then he saw that she was looking at
him too, steadily, with a deep, inquiring kindness.

It was as though she had said aloud:

"Are you really a good little boy, Robert?"

The cider poured over the edge of the glass and over the table-cloth and
in a dismal stream on to the lap of the girl with the raffish billycock
hat.

"Well, that settles that," she said good-humouredly. "My only skirt,
friends. She can't turn me out in my petticoat, can she? Oh, leave it
alone, garcong; it doesn't matter a tinker's curse----"

He could not help it. In the midst of his