that his best affections
had been wantonly and violently lacerated. It made him more miserable
than he had ever felt before, and he could not tolerate the wretched
thought that his father's sad history, probably in some distorted form,
had been, by some means or other, bruited about among unsympathising
hearers, and made the common property of the school. He knew well
indeed the natural delicacy of feeling which would prevent any other
boy, except Jones or Mackworth, from ever alluding to it even in the
remotest way. But that they should know at all the shameful charge
which had broken his father's heart, and brought temporary suspicion and
dishonour on his name, was gall and wormwood to him.

_Yet, by what possible means could, this have become known to them_?
Kenrick knew of one way only. He thought over what Jones had said. "A
cart and blind horse--ah! I see; there is _only one person_ who could
have told him about that. So, _Walter Evson_, you amuse yourself and
Jones by making fun of our being poor, and by ridiculing what you saw in
our house; a very good laugh you've all had over it in the dormitory,
I've no doubt."

Kenrick did not know that Jones had seen them from the window of the
railway-carriage, and that as he had been visiting an aunt at no great
distance, he had heard there the particulars of Mr Kenrick's history.
He clutched angrily at the conclusion, that _Walter_ had betrayed him,
and turned him into derision. Naturally passionate, growing up during
the wilful years of opening boyhood without a father's wise control, he
did not stop to inquire, but leapt at once to a false and obstinate
inference. "It must be so; it clearly _is_ so," he thought; "yet I
could not have believed it of him;" and he burst into a flood of bitter
and angry tears.

The fact was that Kenrick, though he would hardly have admitted it even
to himself, was in a particularly ready mood to take offence. He had
observed that Walter disapproved of his manner towards his mother, and
his sensitive pride had already been ruffled by the fact that Walter had
exercised the moral courage of pointing out, though in the most delicate
and modest way, the brusquerie which he reprobated. At the time he had
said little, but in reality this had made him very, very angry; and the
more so because he was jealous enough to fancy that he now stood second
only, or even third, in Walter's estimation, and that Power and
Henderson had deposed