Larry was discovering that he was something of an anomaly. "Only an
R.C. by accident," as he had heard someone say, in apparent
extenuation (a benevolence that he found irritating). He was learning
the meaning of the sudden silences, the too obvious changes of the
course of conversation, that seemed to occur when he drew near. He had
not, as yet, formulated these things to himself, but, on this
turbulent afternoon, it was possibly some livelier apprehension of
them that made him gravitate towards Barty Mangan, as towards a fellow
pariah, and induced him to seek with him the far asylum of the
schoolroom. There, save for the schoolroom cat, they were alone, and
they sat for some minutes in grateful silence, looking out, across
misty stretches of grass, to the river, and beyond it to the dense
green of the trees of Coppinger's Court. The sky was very low and
grey; by leaning out of the window a little, a far-off reach of river,
at the western end of the valley, could be descried; above it there
was a narrow slit in the clouds, and through it a faint and lovely
primrose light fell, like a veil, that hid, while it told of the
deathbed repentance of the dying day. Larry dragged his chair into the
corner of the window, and watched the growing glory of the sunset with
all his ardent soul in his eyes.

Whatever this boy did, he did vividly, and to Barty Mangan, seated on
the shadow side, watching him, he was, as ever, a pageant, a being of
incalculable impulse, of flashing intensity and splendour.

"Where on earth did you go, Barty? I looked about for you for ages
before I found you; but there was such an awful crowd of women--I'm
jolly glad to get out of it!" Larry leaned back in his chair and
proceeded to light a cigarette, as an assertion of the rights of a man
of nearly seventeen.

"My father was taking Tishy and me about, showing us the house,"
replied Barty, apologetically. (As a matter of fact, he said "me
fawther," but if this, and similar details of pronunciation, are not
known by nature, it is labour in vain to attempt to indicate them by
means of the wholly inadequate English alphabet.) "Larry," he went on,
with the candour that made a gentleman of him, "I never was in a house
like this before. I declare to you it frightens me! I feel like a rat
gone astray! I was in the dining-room by myself, looking at the
pictures, and that old fella' of a butler came in and frightened the
heels off me! He kept an eye on me th