to me still, when you came in, and said,
`Too late,' and banged the door, which I took for an answer to my
thoughts."

They were the first serious words Kenrick had ever heard from Wilton;
but he did not choose to heed them, and only said, after a pause--

"Other fellows better than you? Not a bit of it. Less plucky, perhaps;
greater hypocrites, certainly; but you are the jolliest of them all,
Ra."

And with that silly, silly speech Wilton was reassured; a gratified
smile perched itself upon his lips, and his eyes sparkled with delight;
nor was he soon revisited by any qualms of conscience.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.

DISENCHANTMENT.

"How do you get on with the young Evson, Ra?" asked Mackworth of Wilton,
with a sneer.

"Not at all," said Wilton. "He's awfully particular and strait-laced,
just like that brother of his. No more fun while he's in the house."

"Confound him," said Mackworth, frowning darkly; "if he doesn't like
what he sees, he must lump it. He's not worth any more trouble."

"So, Mack, _you_ too have discovered what he's like."

"Yes, I have," answered Mackworth savagely. For all his polish, his
courtesies, and civilities had not succeeded in making Charlie conceal
how much he feared and disliked him. The young horse rears the first
time it hears the adder's hiss, and the dove's eye trembles
instinctively when the hawk is near. Charlie half knew and half guessed
the kind of character he had to deal with, and made Mackworth hate him
with deadly hatred by the way in which, without one particle of rudeness
or conceit, he managed to keep him at a distance, and check every
approach to intimacy.

With Kenrick the case was different. Charlie thought that he looked one
of the nicest and best fellows in the house, but he could not get over
the fact that Wilton was his favourite. It was Wilton's constant and
daily boast that Ken would do anything for him; and Charlie felt that
Wilton was not a boy whom Walter or Power at any rate would even have
tolerated, much less liked. It was this that made him receive Kenrick's
advances with shyness and coldness; and when Kenrick observed this, he
at once concluded that Charlie had been set against him by Walter, and
that he would report to Walter all he did and said. This belief was
galling to him as wormwood. Suddenly, and with most insulting
publicity, he turned Charlie off from being one of his fags, and from
that time never spoke of him without a