w-legged young
man in knickerbockers, who was good at football and used to lament the
gentle birth that prevented his becoming a professional. The boys called
him Gentleman Joe; but they were careful not to let Mr. Palmer hear
them, for he had a punch and did not believe in cuddling the young. He
used to jeer openly at his colleague, Mr. Spaull, who never played
football, never did anything in the way of exercise except wrestle
flirtatiously with the boys, while Mr. Palmer was bellowing up and down
the field of play and charging his pupils with additional vigour to
counteract the feebleness of Mr. Spaull. Poor Mr. Spaull, he was
ordained about three years after Mark came to Slowbridge, and a week
later he was run over by a brewer's dray and killed.

CHAPTER X

WHIT-SUNDAY

Mark at the age of fifteen was a bitter, lonely, and unattractive boy.
Three years of Haverton House, three years of Uncle Henry's desiccated
religion, three years of Mr. Palmer's athletic education and Mr.
Spaull's milksop morality, three years of wearing clothes that were too
small for him, three years of Haverton House cooking, three years of
warts and bad haircutting, of ink and Aunt Helen's confident purging had
destroyed that gusto for life which when Mark first came to Slowbridge
used to express itself in such loud laughter. Uncle Henry probably
supposed that the cure of his nephew's irritating laugh was the
foundation stone of that successful career, which it would soon be time
to discuss in detail. The few months between now and Mark's sixteenth
birthday would soon pass, however dreary the restrictions of Haverton
House, and then it would be time to go and talk to Mr. Hitchcock about
that articled clerkship toward the fees for which the small sum left by
his mother would contribute. Mark was so anxious to be finished with
Haverton House that he would have welcomed a prospect even less
attractive than Mr. Hitchcock's office in Finsbury Square; it never
occurred to him that the money left by his mother could be spent to
greater advantage for himself. By now it was over L500, and Uncle Henry
on Sunday evenings when he was feeling comfortably replete with the
day's devotion would sometimes allude to his having left the interest to
accumulate and would urge Mark to be up and doing in order to show his
gratitude for all that he and Aunt Helen had conferred upon him. Mark
felt no gratitude; in fact at this period he felt nothing except a