“He went up with Smith a quarter of an hour ago. I don’t know if he’s still there.” “I’ll go and see,” said Adair. “I should like a word with him if he isn’t busy.” CHAPTER LIV ADAIR HAS A WORD WITH MIKE Mike, all unconscious of the stirring proceedings which had been going on below stairs, was peacefully reading a letter he had received that morning from Strachan at Wrykyn, in which the successor to the cricket captaincy which should have been Mike’s had a good deal to say in a lugubrious strain. In Mike’s absence things had been going badly with Wrykyn. A broken arm, contracted in the course of some rash experiments with a day-boy’s motor-bicycle, had deprived the team of the services of Dunstable, the only man who had shown any signs of being able to bowl a side out. Since this calamity, wrote Strachan, everything had gone wrong. The M.C.C., led by Mike’s brother Reggie, the least of the three first-class-cricketing Jacksons, had smashed them by a hundred and fifty runs. Geddington had wiped them off the face of the earth. The Incogs, with a team recruited exclusively from the rabbit-hutch--not a well-known man on the side except Stacey, a veteran who had been playing for the club since Fuller Pilch’s time--had got home by two wickets. In fact, it was Strachan’s opinion that the Wrykyn team that summer was about the most hopeless gang of dead-beats that had ever made an exhibition of itself on the school grounds. The Ripton match, fortunately, was off, owing to an outbreak of mumps at that shrine of learning and athletics--the second outbreak of the malady in two terms. Which, said Strachan, was hard lines on Ripton, but a bit of jolly good luck for Wrykyn, as it had saved them from what would probably have been a record hammering, Ripton having eight of their last year’s team left, including Dixon, the fast bowler, against whom Mike alone of the Wrykyn team had been able to make runs in the previous season. Altogether, Wrykyn had struck a bad patch. Mike mourned over his suffering school. If only he could have been there to help. It might have made all the difference. In school cricket one good batsman, to go in first and knock the bowlers off their length, may take a weak team triumphantly through a season. In school cricket the importance of a good start for the first wicket is incalculable. As he put Strachan’s letter away in his pocket, all his old bitterness against Sedleigh, which had been ebbing during the past few days, returned with a rush. He was conscious once more of that feeling of personal injury which had made him hate his new school on the first day of term. And it was at this point, when his resentment was at its height, that Adair, the concrete representative of everything Sedleighan, entered the room. There are moments in life’s placid course when there has got to be the biggest kind of row. This was one of them. * * * * *