f steps that leads to the Old Schools.
He was carrying some books and papers. Scaife, running down the steps,
charged into him. By great good fortune, no damage was done except to a
nicely-bound Sophocles. John, however, felt assured that Scaife had
deliberately intended to knock him down, seized, possibly, by an ecstasy
of blind rage not uncommon with him. Scaife smiled derisively, and
said--

"A thousand apologies, Verney."

"_One_ is enough," John replied, "if it is sincere."

They eyed each other steadily. John read a furious challenge in Scaife's
bold eyes--more, a menace, the threatening frown of power thwarted.
Scaife seemed to expand, to fill the horizon, to blot out the glad
sunshine. Once again the curious certainty gripped the younger that
Scaife was indeed the personification of evil, the more malefic because
it stalked abroad masked. For Scaife had outlived his reputation as a
breaker of the law. Since that terrible experience in the Fourth Form
Room, he had paid tithe of mint and cummin. As a Sixth Form boy he
upheld authority, laughing the while in his sleeve. He knew, of course,
that one mistake, one slip, would be fatal. And he prided himself on not
making mistakes. He gambled, but not with boys; he drank, not with boys;
he denied his body nothing it craved; but he never forgot that expulsion
from Harrow meant the loss of a commission in a smart cavalry regiment.
When it was intimated to him that the Guards did not want his father's
son, he laughed bitterly, and swore to himself that he would show the
stuck-up snobs what a soldier they had turned away. A soldier he fully
intended to be--a dashing cavalry leader, if the Fates were kind. His
luck would stand by him; if not--why--what was life without luck? He had
never been a reader, but he read now the lives of soldiers. Murat,
Uxbridge, Cardigan, Hodson, were his heroes. Talking of their
achievements, he inflamed his own mind and Desmond's.

The pleasant summer days passed. May melted into June. And each Sunday
John and Desmond walked to the Haunted House, ascended the tower, and
talked. Scaife was leaving at the end of the summer. Desmond was staying
on for the winter term; then John would have him entirely to himself.
This thought illumined dark hours, when he saw his friend whirled away
by Scaife, transported, as it were, by the irresistible power of the man
of action. That nothing should be wanting to that trebly-fortunate
youth, he had helped t