By six it was all over. Helmsworth had won by twenty runs, and David had taken eight wickets. And though, since his return from Marchester, he had often told himself that this was only a scuggy little private school, this was a moment worth living for, for not only did the scuggy little private school roar at him as he came to the pavilion with the rest of the team, but the disgraced and vanquished giants of public schools, people of sixteen and seventeen, came out shouting “Well bowled, Blaize,” with the most generous appreciation. The Head was there, too, clapping his hands, and Goggles was there, beaming through her large round spectacles, and Carrots, with her hair shining in the sun . . . they were all there. David came up the steps to the pavilion all alone, for the rest of the eleven suddenly stood away from him and shoved him forward, crimson in the face with exertion and joy. “Oh, ’twasn’t me, sir,” he said to the Head, who patted his shoulder. “It was just the ground: it played awfully queer.” And he buried his delightful confusion in a quart of lemonade. So in delicious triumph the last hours of David’s school-life passed, and from the train next morning he saw between the trees the fleeting glances of the roofs which for three years had been his home. CHAPTER VII David’s father lived in a grey, rambling house in the close at Baxminster, a plan of his that, as far as David went, had something to be said both for and against it. In its favour was the fact that the house contained a whole top-story of dusky and mysterious attics, roofed in the dimness by cobwebby beams, and used only for lumber-places and cisterns. Here it had been delightful in years gone by to find pleasing terrors in these dark and doubtful corners, amid the gurgles of water-pipes. Here he and his sister (in those years gone by, or in other words until a few months ago) had often passed entrancing wet afternoons, daring each other, particularly at the closing in of dusk, to explore the farthest recesses even to that last attic of all, which contained a large coffin-like box and a cistern that unexpectedly gave sudden and mirthless goblin-chuckles to itself, most harrowing to nerves already keenly on edge. The rules generally in force were that one of them had to go and sit alone in that very spooky chamber, with face turned honestly away from the door, while the other dressed up in any horrific garb that might suggest itself to a fevered imagination, and, having stealthily entered, frightened the watcher with this hideous apparition, accompanying it by any such noise of screaming or groaning that might appear suitable. With the victim looking steadily away from the door, these noises might go on, like an artillery attack, until his nerves were thoroughly shaken, though he had not yet seen what the apparition was to be. David had once frightened Margery into hysterics