The two boys looked each other in the face, and then, like the confidential augurs, burst out laughing. "You know you detest him," said Duncan. "No, I don't. He never did me any harm that I know of." "Hm!--well, _I_ detest him." "Well!" answered Eric, "on coming to think of it, so do I. And yet he's popular enough in the school. I wonder how that is." "He's not _really_ popular. I've often noticed that fellows pretty generally despise him, yet somehow don't like to say so." "Why do you dislike him, Duncan?" "I don't know. Why do you?" "I don't know either." Neither Eric nor Duncan meant this answer to be false, and yet if they had taken the trouble to consider, they would have found out in their secret souls the reasons of their dislike. Ball had been to school before, and of this school he often bragged as the acme of desirability and wickedness. He was always telling boys what they did at "his old school," and he quite inflamed the minds of such as fell under his influence by marvellous tales of the wild and wilful things which he and his former school-fellows had done. Many and many a scheme of sin and mischief at Roslyn was suggested, planned, and carried out, on the model of Ball's reminiscences of his previous life. He had tasted more largely of the tree of the knowledge of evil than any other boy, and, strange to say, this was the secret why the general odium was never expressed. He claimed his guilty experience so often as a ground of superiority, that at last the claim was silently allowed. He spoke from the platform of more advanced iniquity, and the others listened first curiously, and then eagerly to his words. "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Such was the temptation which assailed the other boys in dormitory Number 7; and Eric among the number. Ball was the tempter. Secretly, gradually, he dropped into their too willing ears the poison of his immorality. In brief, this boy was cursed with a degraded and corrupting mind. I hurry over a part of my subject inconceivably painful; I hurry over it, but if I am to perform my self-imposed duty of giving a true picture, of what school-life _sometimes_ is, I must not pass it by altogether. The first time that Eric heard indecent words in dormitory Number 7, he was shocked beyond bound or measure. Dark though it was, he felt himself blushing scarlet to the roots of his hair, and then growing pale again, while a hot dew was left upon his forehead. Ball was the speaker; but this time there was a silence, and the subject instantly dropped. The others felt that a "new boy" was in the room; they did not know how he would take it; they were unconsciously abashed. Besides, though they had themselves joined in such conversation before, they did not love it, and, on the contrary, felt ashamed of yielding to it.