heir petition in
bankruptcy.

In due course Tom Perkins took Holy Orders and entered upon the profession
for which he was so admirably suited. He had been an assistant master at
Wellington and then at Rugby.

But there was quite a difference between welcoming his success at other
schools and serving under his leadership in their own. Tar had frequently
given him lines, and Squirts had boxed his ears. They could not imagine
how the Chapter had made such a mistake. No one could be expected to
forget that he was the son of a bankrupt linendraper, and the alcoholism
of Cooper seemed to increase the disgrace. It was understood that the Dean
had supported his candidature with zeal, so the Dean would probably ask
him to dinner; but would the pleasant little dinners in the precincts ever
be the same when Tom Perkins sat at the table? And what about the depot?
He really could not expect officers and gentlemen to receive him as one of
themselves. It would do the school incalculable harm. Parents would be
dissatisfied, and no one could be surprised if there were wholesale
withdrawals. And then the indignity of calling him Mr. Perkins! The
masters thought by way of protest of sending in their resignations in a
body, but the uneasy fear that they would be accepted with equanimity
restrained them.

"The only thing is to prepare ourselves for changes," said Sighs, who had
conducted the fifth form for five and twenty years with unparalleled
incompetence.

And when they saw him they were not reassured. Dr. Fleming invited them to
meet him at luncheon. He was now a man of thirty-two, tall and lean, but
with the same wild and unkempt look they remembered on him as a boy. His
clothes, ill-made and shabby, were put on untidily. His hair was as black
and as long as ever, and he had plainly never learned to brush it; it fell
over his forehead with every gesture, and he had a quick movement of the
hand with which he pushed it back from his eyes. He had a black moustache
and a beard which came high up on his face almost to the cheek-bones, He
talked to the masters quite easily, as though he had parted from them a
week or two before; he was evidently delighted to see them. He seemed
unconscious of the strangeness of the position and appeared not to notice
any oddness in being addressed as Mr. Perkins.

When he bade them good-bye, one of the masters, for something to say,
remarked that he was allowing himself plenty of time to catch his trai