No umpire will be able to give this in; there’s Mr. Rutter a good two yards down the pitch, legging it for dear life; and here comes the ball like a bullet. He’s out if it doesn’t miss the wicket after all; but it does miss it, by a coat of varnish, and ricochets to the boundary for other four, that win the match for the school, the ultimate honour of three figures, for Evan Devereux, and peace beyond this racket for George Grimwood. Over the ground swarm the whole school like a small Surrey crowd, but Evan and Jan have been too quick for them; they break through the swift outer fringe; and it is not Lord’s or the Oval after all. Nobody cares so much who wins this match, it’s the magnificent finish that matters and will matter while the school exists. So the dense mass before the pavilion parts in two, and the smiling Old Boys march through the lane; but it does not close up again until Rutter has come out and given Devereux his colours in the dear old way, by taking the blue sash from his own waist and tying it round that of his friend. Did somebody say that Devereux was blubbing from excitement? It was not the case; but nobody was watching Jan. CHAPTER XXVII THE EXTREME PENALTY It is not to be pretended that a cloud of live young eye-witnesses make quite so much of these excitements as the historian old or young; they may yell themselves hoarse in front of the pavilion, but the beads are not wiped from their heroes’ brows before the question is, “What shall we do till lock-up?” It is only the Eleven who want to talk it all over in that sanctum of swelldom, the back room at Maltby’s, and only its latest member who has a tremendous telegram to send to his people first. And then it so happens that he does not join them; neither does the Captain of Cricket, though for once in his captaincy he would be really welcome. Evan had retired to his house, and not a bit as though the school belonged to him, but with curiously little of the habitual strut (now that he had something to strut about) in his almost unsteady gait. Jan, too, was ensconced in Heriot’s, and quite unnecessarily prepared to dodge Evan at any moment, or to protect himself with a third person if run to ground. The third person was naturally Chips Carpenter, who had gone mad on the ground, and was now working off the fit in a parody of “The Battle of Blenheim” in place of an ordinary prose report of the latest and most famous of all victories. Though there was no sign of Evan, and after an hour or so little likelihood of his appearance, still Jan kept dodging in and out of the Editor’s study, like an uneasy spirit. And once he remarked that there was an awful row in the lower passage, apparently suggesting that Chips ought to go down and quell it. But Chips had never been a Crabtree in the house, and at present he was too deep in his rhyming dictionary to hear either the row or Jan.