“Oh, yes, it is.... Anyhow it's my way. I wonder what there is about me that makes people hate me so.” “People don't.” “Yes, they do. At home, here--it's all the same. I'm always having to fight about something, always coming up against things.” “I suppose it's your destiny,” said Bobby. “You always say it's to teach you pluck.” “That's what an old chap I knew in Cornwall said. But why can't I be let alone? How I loved that bit last year when the fellows liked me--only the decent things never last.” “It'll be all right later,” Bobby answered, thinking that he had never seen anything finer than the way Peter had taken that afternoon. “In a way,” he went on, “you fellows are lucky to get a chance of standing up against that sort of thing; it's damned good practice. Nobody ever thinks I'm worth while.” “Well,” said Peter, throwing a clod of dark, scented earth into the air and losing sight of it in the black wall about him--“Here's to next year's battle!” CHAPTER VII PRIDE OF LIFE I Peter never saw Dawson's again. When the summer holidays had run some three weeks a letter arrived stating, quite simply and tersely that, owing to the non-payment by evading parents of bills long overdue and to many other depressing and unavoidable circumstances Mr. Barbour and that House of Cards, his school, had fallen to pieces. There at any rate was an end to that disastrous accumulation of brick and mortar, and the harm that, living, it had wrought upon the souls and bodies of its victims its dying could not excuse. No tears were shed for Dawson's. Peter, at the news, knew that now his battle never could be won. That battle at any rate must be left behind him with his defeat written large upon the plain of it, and this made in some unrealised way the penalty of the future months harder to bear. He had, behind him, defeat. Look at it as he might, he had been a failure at Dawson's--he had not done the things that he had been put there to do--and yet through the disaster he knew that in so far as he had refused to bend to the storm so far there had been victory; of that at any rate he was sure. So he turned resolutely from the past and faced the future. It was as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed--a dream, a fantasy, a delirium--something that had left no external things behind it and had only in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its mark. He faced his House....