'Think so!' Faussett echoed. 'Why, of course I do; it's magnificent. Only--for the honour of the school, you know, Trev--I really think you oughtn't to have done it. You ought to have tried your very best to lick him.' 'How did you find it out?' Trevor Gillingham asked languidly. He affected languor at times as an eminently poetic attitude. 'How did I find it out? Why, you as good as acknowledged it yourself when you said to him just now, “Your need was the greater.” There aren't many, fellows who'd have done it, Trev, I swear; but it wasn't right, all the same; you've the school to consider; and you ought to have fought him through thick and thin for it!' The Born Poet stroked his beardless chin with recovered self-satisfaction. This was a capital idea--a first-rate way out of it! For his own part, he had written all he knew, and tried his very best to get that Scholarship; but if Faussett chose to think he had deliberately given it away, out of pure quixotic goodness of heart, to his obscure competitor from Giggleswick School--or was the place called Chiddingwick?--whose need was the greater, why, it wasn't any business of his to correct or disclaim that slight misapprehension. And in three days more, indeed, it was the firm belief of every right-minded Rugby boy that 'Gillingham of our school' could easily have potted the Durham Scholarship if he'd chosen; but he voluntarily retired from the contest beforehand--morally scratched for it, so to speak--because he knew there was another fellow going in for the stakes 'whose need,' as he generously phrased it, 'was the greater.' And meanwhile Dick Plantagenet himself, the real hero of the day, was straggling down, more dead than alive for joy, towards the Oxford postoffice, to send off the very first telegram he had ever despatched in his life: '“Miss Maud Plantagenet, Chiddingwick, Surrey.--Hooray! I've got it, the hundred pound history.” Thirteen words: sixpence ha'penny. Strike out the Maud, and it's the even sixpence.' CHAPTER VII. AFFAIRS OF THE HEART. |The return to Chiddingwick was a triumphal entry. Before seven o'clock that evening, when the South-Eastern train crawled at its accustomed leisurely pace, with a few weary gasps, into Chiddingwick Station, Mr. Plantagenet had spread the news of his son's success broadcast through the town, _viâ_ the White Horse parlour. Already, on the strength of Dick's great achievement, he had become the partaker, at other people's expense, of no fewer than three separate brandies-and-sodas; which simple Bacchic rites, more frequently repeated, would have left him almost incapable of meeting the hero of the hour with suitable effect, had not Maud impounded him, so to speak, by main force after five o'clock tea, and compelled him to remain under strict supervision in the domestic gaol till the eve of Dick's arrival.