Then suddenly Traill and Perrin both rose from the floor. Traill's lip was cut and bleeding—coffee was on Perrin's collar; their faces were very white. For a moment they looked at each other in absolute silence, then they passed, without a spoken word, through the open door. In such a way, and from such a cause, did this Battle of the Umbrella have its beginning. Let us credit the gods with interest sufficient, and we see that it had been their pleasant amusement to beguile those tedious Olympian hours with a game; and to the onlooker, here is comedy enough, for about what simpler can mortals dispute than this green umbrella? But for others, more nearly concerned, there is some question of tragedy involved. CHAPTER VIII—THE BATTLE OP THE UMBRELLA; CAMPS ARE FORMED—ALSO SOME SKIRMISHING I. ISABEL DESART heard about it early on the afternoon of the same day. Traill himself told her as he stood with her for a moment outside the school gates before he went down to football. She saw it at once more seriously than he did; his attitude had been that it was a pity, above all that it was indecorous, that he had, in a way, made a fool of himself—that to struggle in that fashion with a man like Perrin before an audience was a pity. But to her it was a great deal more than this. In many ways she was older than Archie Traill, and her feminine intuition helped her now; she saw Perrin as something to be feared and also something to be pitied, and she did not know which of these feelings was the stronger. She had always seen Perrin as someone to be pitied—that was the reason of her kindness to him—and now that he was ludicrous, now that his climax had made him prominent, her pity for him was increased. But she was also afraid. She guessed suddenly a great deal more than she could actually see; she felt the miserable years that he had been through, she felt his hatred of his own position, and she knew that he would not be likely to forgive the man who had brought all this to a climax. They were all at such terribly close quarters. It would be easy enough to get away from that sort of incident if they all of them were, as she put it to herself, “spread out”; but halfterm was only just over and she did not know what the next six weeks might bring. Traill's feeling, she saw, was mainly one of disgust—the same kind of sensation that he would have had if he had not been able to have his bath in the morning. About Perrin he only felt contempt, a man who could make that kind of disturbance about so small a thing.... Traill's final opinion, in fact, about it all was that “it wasn't done” and that Perrin was therefore an “outsider,” and that there the thing ended. Isabel, in the few words that he had time to say to her, saw all this and knew that his attitude would not make the whole affair any easier. But she was wise enough to leave it all where it was for the moment and simply to tell him that she was sorry.