ootball. He
was fairly successful in the first match, and afterward Carben, the
secretary of the college club, invited him to tea. This insignificant
courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of pleasure, inasmuch as it
was the first occasion on which he had been invited to his rooms by a
second-year man. With Carben he found about half a dozen other seniors
and a couple of freshmen whom he did not remember to have noticed
before; and the warm room, whose murmurous tinkle was suddenly hushed
as he entered, affected him with a glowing hospitality.

Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made a
general observation on the row of Sunday night's celebration, Michael
proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.

"Were you in that gang?" Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous
surprise.

"I was fined," Michael announced, trying to quench the note of
exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was
creating.

"I say," Carben sneered, "so at last one of the 'bloods' is going to
condescend to play Rugger. Jonah," he called to the captain of the
Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the
room, "we've got a college blood playing three-quarter for us."

"Good work," said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. "Where is he?"

Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.

"No end of a blood," Carben went on. "Lights bonfires and gets fined all
in his first week."

The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult
Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses
should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two
freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish
perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael
promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red
wrists and their smug insignificance.

"You were at St. James', weren't you?" asked Jones. "Did you know
Mansfield?"

"I didn't know him--exactly," said Michael, "but--in fact--we thought
him rather a tick."

"Thanks very much and all that," said Jones. "He was a friend of mine,
but don't apologize."

There was a general laugh at Michael's expense from which Carben's
guffaw survived. "Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,"
he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was
something positively contemptible.

Michael retired fr