er, and if he had
often been idle at Saint Winifred's, he had, on the other hand, often
worked exceedingly hard during the holidays at Fuzby, where, unlike
other boys, he had little or nothing else to amuse him. Mrs Kenrick,
sitting beside him silent at her work for long hours, would have been
glad enough to see in him more elasticity, more kindliness, less
absorption in his own selfish pursuits; but she rejoiced that at home,
at any rate, he did not waste his vacant days in idleness, or spend them
in questionable amusements and undesirable society.

Almost the only boy of whom he saw much now was Wilton, and but for him,
I do believe, that in those days he would have changed his whole tone of
thought and mode of life. But he had a strange liking for this
worthless boy, who kept alive in him his jealousy of Walter, his
opposition to the other monitors, his partisanship, his recklessness,
and his pride. Sometimes Kenrick felt this. He saw that Wilton was bad
as well as attractive, and that their friendship, instead of doing
Wilton any good, only did himself harm. But he could not make up his
mind to throw him off, for there was no one else who seemed to feel for
him as a close and intimate friend. Many of Kenrick's failings rose
from that. He had offended, and rejected, and alienated his early and
true friends, and he felt now that it was easier to lose friends than to
make them, or to recover their affection when it once was lost.

But the bad set at Saint Winifred's, though in one house their influence
was weakened, were determined not to see it wane throughout the school.
Harpour and his associates organised a regular conspiracy against the
monitors. When the first light snow fell they got together a very large
number of fellows, and snowballed all the monitors except Kenrick, as
they came out of morning school. The exception was very much to
Kenrick's discredit, and in his heart he felt it to be so. During the
first day or two that this lasted the monitors took it good-humouredly,
returning the snowballs, and regarding it as a joke, though an annoying
one; but when it became more serious, when some snowballs had been
thrown at the masters also, and when some of the worst fellows began to
collect snowballs beforehand and harden them into great lumps of ice as
hard as stones, and when Brown, who was short-sighted, and was therefore
least able to protect himself, had received a serious blow, Power, by
the adv