“Besides,” added Devereux, returning rather suddenly to his original ground, “I’m blowed if I myself could swear I’d ever seen the body.” “You wouldn’t,” remarked Jan, sympathetically. “You didn’t have a good enough look.” “Yet you saw enough to make you bolt,” said that offensive Chips, and opened all the dampers of Evan’s natural heat. “It wasn’t what I saw, my good fool!” he cried angrily. “You know as well as I do what it was like up there. That’s the only reason I cleared out.” “Well, there you are!” said Jan, grinning aloft on his rail. “Then you agree with Carpenter, do you, that it’s our duty to go in and report the whole thing, and get a licking for our pains?” Carpenter laughed satirically at the “licking,” but refrained from speech. He knew of old that Evan’s horror of the rod was on a par with the ordinary citizen’s horror of gaol. And he could not help wanting Jan to know it—but Jan did. Once, in the very oldest days, when the pretty boy and the stable brat were playing together for almost the first time, the boy had broken a window and begged the brat to father the crime. Jan would not have told Chips for worlds; indeed, he was very sorry to have recalled so dim an incident out of the dead past; but there it was, unbidden, and here was the same inveterate abhorrence, not so much of actual punishment, but of being put in an unfavourable light in the eyes of others. That was a distinctive trait of Evan’s, peculiar only in its intensity. Both his old companions were equally reminded of it now. But Jan’s was the hard position! To have got in touch with Evan at last, to admire him as he always had and would, and yet to have that admiration promptly tempered by this gratuitous exhibition of a radical fault! Though he put it to himself in simpler fashion, this was Jan’s chief trouble, and it would have been bad enough just then without the necessity that he foresaw of choosing between Chips and Evan. “I don’t know about duty,” he temporised, “but I don’t believe we should be licked.” “Of course we shouldn’t!” cried Chips. “But it wouldn’t kill us if we were.” “You agree with him?” persisted Evan, in a threatening voice of which the meaning was not lost on Jan. It meant out-of-touch again in no time, and for good! “I don’t know,” sighed Jan. “I suppose we ought to say what we’ve seen; and it’ll pay us, too, if it’s going to get out anyhow; but I do think it’s hard on you—Devereux. We dragged you into it. You never wanted to come in; you said so over and over.” Jan gloomed and glowered, then brightened in a flash. “Look here! I vote us two tell Heriot what we’ve seen, Chips! Most likely he won’t ask if we were by ourselves; he’s sure to think we were. If he does ask, we can say there was another chap, but we’d rather not mention his name, because he was dead against the whole thing, and never saw all we did!”