and every man's room is considered sacred in his
absence. But although he desisted from this kind of malice, it was not
long before Brogten was generally shunned by his former schoolfellows.
He developed into such a thorough blackguard that, had it not been for
his merits as an oarsman and a cricketer, even the countenance of Bruce
and Lord Fitzurse would have been insufficient to prevent him from being
deserted by all the undergraduates of Saint Werner's, except that small
and wretched class who take refuge from vacuity in the society of cads,
dog-fanciers, and grooms.

Yet Brogten's Harton education, idle as he had been, sufficed to make
him see that he was sinking lower and lower, not only in the world's
estimation, but in his own. Unable to make the mental effort which the
least approach to study would have required, he suffered his few
intellectual faculties to grow more and more gross and stolid, and spent
his mornings in smoking, drinking beer, or lounging in the rooms of some
one as idle and discontented as himself. It was sad to see the change
which even in his first term came over his face; it was not the change
from boyhood to youth which gave a manlier beauty to the almost feminine
delicacy of Julian's features, but it was a look in which effrontery
supplied the place of self-dependence, and coarseness was the substitute
for strength. Beer in the morning, and brandy in the evening, cards,
and low company, and vice, made him sink into a degradation from which
he was only redeemed by the still lingering ambition to excel in
athletic sports, and by the manly exercises which rescued him for a time
from such dissipation as would have incapacitated him from shining in
the boat or in the field.

Lillyston was a singular contrast with Brogten; originally they were
about equal in ability, position, and strength. They had entered school
in the same form, and, until Julian came, they had generally been placed
near each other in the quarterly examinations. Both of them were strong
and active, and without being clever or brilliant they were both
possessed of respectable powers of mind. Both of them had been in the
Harton eleven, and now each of them was already in the second boat of
their respective clubs; but with all these similarities Lillyston was
beginning to be one of the men most liked and respected among all the
best sets of his own year, and was reading for honours with a fair
chance of ultimate success