For Pip, the imperturbable, the impenetrable, was--_horresco referens_--in tears! After all, he was barely fifteen, and he had endured a good deal already--the quiet disappointment of Marsh, the thinly veiled scorn of the deposed Elliott, and the half-amused contempt of the rest of the house. He had taken them all in his usual impassive way, and the critics who gathered in knots after the game and condemned Marsh for putting "an absolute kid" into the House Eleven, never suspected that the "kid" in question was struggling, beneath an indifferent exterior, between an intense desire for sympathy and a stubborn determination not to show it. And so these words from his beloved Ham, from whom he had expected at the best disappointed silence, brought to his overwrought soul that relief which he so badly needed; and a large tear, trickling down his nose, warned Mr. Hanbury to remember a pressing engagement elsewhere. Pip soon recovered. "Lucky Ham had to go out then," he soliloquised, "or he'd have seen me blub." Ham returned after a discreet interval, and after a few words of wisdom and encouragement dismissed Pip to bed in a greatly improved frame of mind. * * * * * The Hivites began their second innings thirty-seven runs to the bad. This fact had impressed itself upon the mind of Marsh, the captain, and he decided, in his vigorous way, that if anything was to be done he must do it himself. He accordingly went in first, accompanied by a confirmed "stone-waller," and proceeded to break the hearts of the Hittite bowlers. Nothing could shake the steadiness of the two players. The most beautiful balls were sent down to them--balls which pitched halfway and wavered alluringly, waiting to be despatched to square-leg, half-volleys, full-pitches, wides; but nothing would tempt them to take liberties. Marsh played sound cricket, and made runs; but his companion played a purely defensive game, his performance being accentuated by a series of sharp knocks, or dull thuds, according as he played the ball with his bat or his body. The arrears had been exactly wiped off when this hero, in endeavouring to interpose as much of his adamantine person as possible between his wicket and a leg-break, lurched heavily backwards and mowed down all three stumps. He retired amid applause. But the Hivites were not out of the wood. The next two batsmen succumbed rather unluckily, the one leg-before, the other caught at the wicket,--the two ways in which no batsman is ever really out,--and a rot set in. Marsh, it was true, was playing the innings of his life. All bowling seemed to come alike to him, and he usually contrived to score a single at the end of the over and so prolonged the lives of his various fluttered partners. But he could not do everything, and when Pip came in last, the score was only a hundred and five, of which Marsh had made seventy.