mate. At the moment he was perhaps neither so acutely
conscientious nor such an ass as his critics considered him.

"What else do you propose?" inquired Mr. Spearman.

"Well, sir, I have plenty of other friends in town, sir. Either the
Knaggses or Miss Harbottle would put me up in a minute, sir."

"Who are the Knaggses?"

"The boys were with me at Mr. Coverley's, sir; they go to Westminster now.
One of them stayed with us last holidays. They live in St. John's Wood
Park."

"And the lady you mentioned?"

"Miss Harbottle, sir, an old friend of my mother's; it was through her I
went to Mr. Coverley's, and I've often stayed there. She's in the
Wellington Road, sir, quite close to Lord's."

Mr. Spearman smiled at the gratuitous explanation of an eagerness that
other lads might have taken more trouble to conceal. But there was no
guile in any Upton; in that one respect the third and last of them
resembled the great twin brethren of whom he had been prematurely voted a
"pocket edition" on his arrival in the school. He had few of their other
merits, though he took a morbid interest in the games they played by light
of nature, as well as in things both beyond and beneath his brothers and
the average boy. You cannot sit up half your nights with asthma and be an
average boy. This was obvious even to Mr. Spearman, who was an average
man. He had never disguised his own disappointment in the youngest Upton,
but had often made him the butt of outspoken and disastrous comparisons.
Yet in his softer moments he had some sympathy with the failure of an
otherwise worthy family; this fine June morning he seemed even to
understand the joy of a jaunt to London for a boy who was getting very
little out of his school life. He made a note of the two names and
addresses.

"You're quite sure they'll put you up, are you?". "Absolutely certain,
sir."

"But you'll come straight back if they can't?"

"Rather, sir!"

"Then run away, and don't miss your train."

Pocket interpreted the first part of the injunction so literally as to
arrive very breathless in his study. That diminutive cell was garnished
with more ambitious pictures than the generality of its order; but the
best of them was framed in the ivy round the lattice window, and its
foreground was the nasturtiums in the flower-box. Pocket glanced down
into the quad, where the fellows were preparing construes for second
school in sunlit groups on garden seats. At that