ered Mr Noel's house.
Walter knew that Mr Percival's promotion had frustrated the plan he had
formed when he advised his father to put Charlie in that house, but the
step could not now be recalled, nor, indeed, was Walter or any other
monitor aware how bad the state of things had become. For among other
dangerous innovations, Mackworth and Wilton had brought about a kind of
understanding, that the house should to some extent keep to itself,
resent all intrusion into its own precincts, and maintain a profound
silence about its own secrets. Besides all this, Walter bitterly and
sorrowfully felt that for some reason, which he was unable to fathom,
the whole school was just then in an unsatisfactory state, and that
Charlie, for whom his whole heart yearned with brotherly love and pity,
would be exposed to severe temptations in whatever house he should be
placed. He hoped too that, as Charlie would always have the run of his
and of Power's study, it would make little difference to him that he was
under a different house master.

To Mackworth and Wilton the arrival of one or two new boys was a matter
of some importance, but little anxiety. The new boys were necessarily
young, and in the present united state of the house, it was tolerably
certain that they would catch the prevalent spirit, and be quickly
assimilated to the condition of the others. The task of moulding them--
if they were at all difficult to manage--fell to Wilton, and he
certainly accomplished it with astonishing success. A newcomer's
sensibilities were not too quickly shocked. The Noelites, for their own
purposes, behaved very kindly to him at first; they were first-rate
hands at "destroying a boy by means of his best affections," at
"seething a kid in its mother's milk." The bad language, the school
trickeries and deceits, the dodges for breaking rules and escaping
punishments, the agreed-on lies to avoid detection, the suppers, and
brandy, and smoking parties, and false keys to get out after lock-up,
and all the other detestable symptoms of a vitiated and depraved set,
were carefully kept in abeyance at first. The new fellow was treated
very kindly, was sounded and fathomed cautiously, was taught to get up a
strong house feeling by perpetual endeavours to wake in him the _esprit
de corps_, was gently ridiculed if he displayed any good principle, was
tremendously bullied if he showed signs of recalcitrance, was according
to his temperament led, or c