It was a great sight to see Foster bamboozle Claremont. With the greatest regularity Foster was ploughed in his con., failed to score in Latin prose, and knew nothing of his rep. And yet he never got an imposition. He would point out how hard he worked; he often stayed behind after school for a few seconds to ask Claremont a point in the unseen. Such keenness was unusual, and Claremont could not connect it with the slovenly productions that he had learnt to associate with the name of Foster. For a long time it was a vast enigma. At half term Foster's report consisted of one word, typically Claremontian--"Inscrutable." But manners always win in the end. Foster showed so much zeal, such an honest willingness to learn, that Claremont finally classed him as a hard-working, keen, friendly, but amazingly stupid boy. The Army class, which Foster honoured with his presence, always did Latin and English with Claremont, and for over two years Foster sat at the back of Claremont's room, scoring marks by singles when others scored by tens. Yet his reports were invariably good; he never had an imposition; he never needed to prepare a line of anything. "Well, Foster," Claremont used to say, as he returned a prose entirely besmirched with blue pencil, "I believe you really try, but the result is most disheartening." Foster always looked profoundly distressed; and at the end of the hour he would go up, prose in hand, and ask why the subject of an active verb could not be in the ablative. Two minutes later he would emerge with a broad grin on his face, and murmur to whoever might be near that Claremont was "a most damnable ass, but none the less a pleasant creature." And in the evening hall he and Gordon would discuss how one or other of them had advanced a step further into the enemy's country, and taken one more pawn in the gigantic game of bluff. They were both in their own fashion working to the same end. But at this point the serene calm of Gordon's life was suddenly rudely interrupted by an incursion on the part of "the Bull." About three weeks after the term had begun the Colts played their first game, and like most sides at the beginning of a season, they were terribly disorganised. Lovelace, who had been in under-sixteen teams for years, was the Senior Colts badge and was captain. Burgoyne led the scrum; he was a rough diamond, if indeed a diamond at all, and was not too popular with the side. Foster was scrum half; Collins and Gordon were in the scrum. It was really quite a decent side, but this particular afternoon it started shakily. "The Bull" raged so madly and cursed so furiously that the side became petrified with funk, and could do nothing right. Once and only once did the Colts look like scoring, and then Lovelace knocked on the easiest pass right between the posts.