When Daubeny had first come to Saint Winifred's, he had been forced to go through very great persecution. As he sat down to do his work he would be pelted with orange peel, kicked, tilted off the form on which he sat, ridiculed, and sometimes chased out of the room. All this he had endured with admirable patience and good humour; in short, so patiently and good-humouredly that all boys who had in them a spark of sense or honour very soon abandoned this system of torment, and made up for it as far as they could by respect and kindness, which always, however, took more or less the form of banter. It is not to be expected that boys will ever be made to see that steady, strenuous industry, even when it fails, is a greater and a better thing than idle cleverness, but those few who were so far in advance of their years as to have some intuition of this fact, felt for the character of Daubeny, a value which gave him an influence of a rare and important kind. For nothing could daunt this young martyr--not even failure itself. If he were too much bullied and annoyed to get up his lesson overnight, he would be up by five in the morning working at it with unremitting assiduity. Very often he _overdid_ it, and knew his lesson all the worse in proportion as he had spent upon it too great an amount of time. Without being positively stupid, his intellect was somewhat dull, and as his manner was shy and awkward he had not been quite understood at first, and no master had taken him specially in hand to lighten his burdens. His bitterest trial, therefore, was to fail completely every now and then, and be reproached for it by some master who little knew the hours of weary work which he had devoted to the unsuccessful attempt. This was particularly the case during his first half-year, during which he had been in Mr Robertson's form. It happened that, from the very weariness of brain induced by his working too hard, he had failed in several successive lessons, and Mr Robertson, who was a man of quick temper and stinging speech, had made some very cutting remarks upon him, and sent him, moreover, to detention--a punishment which caused to his sensitive mind a pain hardly less acute than the master's pungent and undeserved sarcasm. This mishap, joined to his low weekly placing, very nearly filled him with despair, and this day might have turned the scale, and fixed him in the position of a heavy and disheartened boy, but for Power, who had come to Saint Winifred's at the same time with Daubeny, and who, although in his unusually rapid progress he had long left Daubeny behind, was then in the same form and the same dormitory with him, and knew how he worked. Power used always to say to his friends that Dubbs was the worthiest, the bravest, the most upright and conscientious boy in all Saint Winifred's school. Daubeny, on the other hand, had for Power the kind of adoration of the savage for the sun; he