of lumps
and scars, he might have been a curate. His face looked tough, and his
eyes harboured always a curiously alert, questioning expression, as if
he were perpetually "sizing up" the person he was addressing. But
otherwise he was like other men. He seemed also to have a pretty taste
in Literature. This, combined with his strong and capable air,
attracted Sheen. Usually he was shy and ill at ease with strangers. Joe
Bevan he felt he had known all his life.

"Do you still fight?" he asked.

"No," said Mr Bevan, "I gave it up. A man finds he's getting on, as the
saying is, and it don't do to keep at it too long. I teach and I train,
but I don't fight now."

A sudden idea flashed across Sheen's mind. He was still glowing with
that pride which those who are accustomed to work with their brains
feel when they have gone honestly through some labour of the hands. At
that moment he felt himself capable of fighting the world and beating
it. The small point, that Albert had knocked him out of time in less
than a minute, did not damp him at all. He had started on the right
road. He had done something. He had stood up to his man till he could
stand no longer. An unlimited vista of action stretched before him. He
had tasted the pleasure of the fight, and he wanted more.

Why, he thought, should he not avail himself of Joe Bevan's services to
help him put himself right in the eyes of the house? At the end of the
term, shortly before the Public Schools' Competitions at Aldershot,
inter-house boxing cups were competed for at Wrykyn. It would be a
dramatic act of reparation to the house if he could win the
Light-Weight cup for it. His imagination, jumping wide gaps, did not
admit the possibility of his not being good enough to win it. In the
scene which he conjured up in his mind he was an easy victor. After
all, there was the greater part of the term to learn in, and he would
have a Champion of the World to teach him.

Mr Bevan cut in on his reflections as if he had heard them by some
process of wireless telegraphy.

"Now, look here, sir," he said, "you should let me give you a few
lessons. You're plucky, but you don't know the game as yet. And
boxing's a thing every one ought to know. Supposition is, you're
crossing a field or going down a street with your sweetheart or your
wife--"

Sheen was neither engaged nor married, but he let the point pass.

--"And up comes one of these hooligans, as they call 'em. What are you
g