mouth surgeon to be sent for, and this afternoon
he had arrived. On his verdict as to Doughty's condition depended
Ishmael's own fate, and he knew it. For, whatever the provocation, the
fact remained that Ishmael had injured a schoolfellow in a wrestling
match admittedly serious in its intent, and the discipline of the school
had to be considered, all the more rigidly that many rumours, mostly
untrue, had circulated in the school. Old Tring had suspended judgment,
merely sending for Boase, who had arrived one evening at St. Renny
covered with smuts and giving freely his opinions about the railway, on
which, for motives of Christian poverty, he had been rash enough to
travel in one of the unroofed third class compartments.

And, for the first time in his knowledge, Ishmael was aware that the
Parson had not quite understood. It was not that he did not understand
what Ishmael felt as much as that he expected him to feel so much more
than he did. Ishmael loathed a fuss. Yet the Parson had been a rock of
support; Old Tring had been generosity itself; Polkinghorne and
Carminow, even the little boys, had held their tongues and let him see
that for their part they intended to think no more of what Doughty had
said. Killigrew had treated the whole affair as something between a joke
and a matter so unimportant it made really no difference to anyone. And
of all the attitudes it was Killigrew's, in the revulsion from fuss,
that Ishmael was beginning to adopt as his own. The only burning thing
he felt about his position was anger--an anger against his father in the
first place and against Archelaus, oddly enough, in the second. He knew
that his eldest brother would do all in his power to make life as
difficult as possible when he went back to take up the reins at Cloom.
With that burning grudge went another sensation--the realisation that if
all things had been otherwise, been normal, Cloom would, after all,
never have been his, and he was struck by a certain unfairness that it
should be his now.

But of any shame at his position he felt none, and it was this that
apparently he was expected to feel by all save Killigrew. They were all
so eager to make him understand that there was nothing for him to feel
ashamed about, that no one thought any the less of him or wanted him to
think any less of himself. Ishmael began to discover what he never,
being very un-self-analytical, fully realised, that he was one of those
elect souls born wi