nd."

"P'r'aps, when he knows you're standing up for me, he'll leave me
alone."

"He'd better."

"My name's Rufus--Rufus Cosgrave. You see, I was born like this, and
my father thought it would be a good joke. I call it beastly."

"Mine's Robert."

The red-haired boy meditated a little longer. He rubbed his arm
against Robert's softly like a young pony.

"I say, let's be friends--shall we?"

Robert gulped and turned his head away.

"All right. I don't mind."

They parted shyly at the corner of Cosgrave's road--a neat double file
of vastly superior villas, as Robert realized with a faint sinking of
the heart; but Robert did not go home. He made his way out to the
dingy fields behind the biscuit factory, and watched the local rag and
bobtail play football, lying hidden in the long grass under the wall so
that they should not see him and fall upon him. Even when it grew dusk
and he knew that Christine must be almost home, he still wandered about
the streets. He was hungry and footsore, his head and body ached, but
he put off the moment when he would have to face her to the very last.
He loved her, and he was not really afraid, though he knew that the
sight of his torn, blood-stained clothes would rouse her to a queer
unreasonable despair; but he had talked so much, so proudly and so
confidently of going to school. And now, how should he tell the tale
of his disgrace, how make clear to her the misery which the
unfathomable gulf between himself and his companions caused in him, or
that because a red-haired, freckled small boy had asked him to fight
Dickson Minor he had lain in the grass with his face hidden in his arms
and wept tears of sacred happiness? There were things you could never
tell, least of all to people whom you loved. They were locked up in
you, and the key had been lost long since.

The street lamps came to life one by one. He strolled down Acacia
Grove, whistling and swinging his legs with an exaggerated
carelessness. He could see their light in the upper window of No. 14.
He was sure that Christine would watch for him, and when the hall door
opened suddenly, he stopped short, shrinking from their encounter. But
it was a man who came out of the gate towards him. For one moment an
awful, reasonless terror made him half turn to run, to run headlong,
never to come back; the next, he recognized the slight, jerky limp
which made his form master so comically bird-like, and stood still,
kn