_de rigueur_.

So on this Thursday pretty well the whole school was out in the Acres,
where the old game was in full swing; and, though I fancy the players to a
man would have liked to have lined up on the touch-line in the next field
and given Shannon the "whisper" he deserves, O.G. claimed them that
afternoon for its own, and they were unwilling martyrs to old Corker's
cast-iron conservatism. Consequently, when Bourne spun the coin and
Shannon decided to play with the wind, there would not be more than
seventy or eighty on the touch-line. Shannon asked me to referee, so I
found a whistle, and the game started.

It was a game in which there seemed to be two or three players who served
as motive forces, and the rest were worked through. On one side Shannon at
back, Amber the International at half, and Aspinall, the International
left-winger, were head and shoulders above the others; on our side, Bourne
and Acton dwarfed the rest.

Bourne played back, and Acton was his partner. Bourne I knew well, since
he was in the Sixth, and I liked him immensely; but of Acton I knew only a
little by repute and nothing personally. He was in the Fifth, but, except
in the ordinary way of school life, he did not come much into the circle
wherein the Sixth moves. He was brilliantly clever, with that sort of
showy brilliance which some fellows possess: in the exams, he would walk
clean through a paper, or leave it untouched--no half measures. He was in
Biffen's house and quite the most important fellow in it, and no end
popular with his own crowd, for they looked to him to give their house a
leg up, both in the schools and in the fields, for Biffen's were the
slackest house in St. Amory's. He played football with a dash and vim good
to see, and I know a good few of the eleven envied him his long, lungeing
rush, which parted man and ball so cleanly, and his quick, sure kick that
dropped the ball unerringly to his forwards. He was not in the eleven; but
that he would be in before the term was over was a "moral." He was
good-looking and rather tall, and had a certain foreign air, I thought;
his dark face seemed to be hard and proud, and I had heard that his temper
was fiery.

Bourne had chosen him to play against Shannon's team, and as Acton bottled
up the forwards on his wing Bourne felt that the school's future right
back would not be far to seek.

I soon saw that the school was not quite good enough for the others:
Shannon was almost