In the respectful hush that had fallen upon the crowd there could be heard distinctly a noise like the beating of a drum. Boys turned, one to the other, in surprise. There was a minute’s keen expectancy. At last solution came. Rouse hove into view, not as one might have expected a popular hero to have appeared, nobly upon the shoulders of his comrades, but hunched upon a bicycle, and the noise accompanying him was not the beating of a drum: it was the bumping of a punctured back tyre on the roadway. His long legs were driving the pedals with laborious care, and between the strokes his knees were rising under his armpits. He was flushed with exertion and suffering from acute self-consciousness, and in this manner he turned in at the gate and came unsteadily along the gravel path. Now when Rouse had said that so soon as he was invited to process he lost all interest in events he had spoken truly. He was never more hopelessly uncomfortable than when he was the centre of admiration or the object of prolonged applause, and during the present term he had had more of this than he could manage. When he had first come into sight his mind had, moreover, been so concentrated upon the importance of making the turn at the gate without colliding with the wall that he did not properly understand what all the cheering was about. He found out quite suddenly, and in that moment, looking along the deep ranks of his applauding followers and realising suddenly that it was all for him and that he was once again the unwilling hero of the hour, he lost his nerve entirely, slowed to a snail’s pace and suddenly fell off. He stood up, not knowing where to look or what to do to stop their cheering. Smythe came to his side and Rouse turned to him gratefully. “I say, do tell them to shut up, will you?” He was sorry to notice that Smythe brushed the point aside. “Where on earth have you been?” he was demanding. “I thought you were coming by trap?” Rouse considered the point absent-mindedly. “I thought so once, too. It seems a long time ago. I can hardly remember the time when I wasn’t sitting on that bike.” “What happened?” “I don’t know. That has yet to be discovered. But when twenty minutes had gone by and there was still no trap we decided we’d got to do something about it. Every bicycle for hire in Harley had been booked up a week ago, so there was nothing for it but to try our luck at cottages, and at one I managed to borrow this.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Until the old man of the house had lifted me into the saddle and given me a lusty shove off down the hill I wasn’t at all sure that I could ride a bicycle, but once the thing was fairly under way I didn’t dare to fall off for fear I should never be able to get on again, so I just kept on pushing the pedals round, and until I got inside these gates I thought of nothing else but sticking on. It was all that cheering upset me.”