The rest of the day was pure, unalloyed joy to Gordon. He rushed off after tea to wire the news home; then he sat in the gallery and listened to the concert. He had expected to enjoy it rather; but the seats were uncomfortable, the music too classical, and he soon stopped paying any attention to the choir, and began a long argument with Collins as to the composition of the Two Cock scrum. The next morning as the train steamed out of Fernhurst, and he lay back in the carriage smoking a cigarette, outwardly with the air of a connoisseur, inwardly with the timid nervousness of a novice, he reflected that, in spite of the Rev. Rogers, school was a pretty decent sort of place. CHAPTER IV: NEW FACES "I say, it _is_ true; Lovelace major has left." "Good Lord, no; is it?" "He's not on the House list?" "I heard he'd passed into the army at last." "I wonder who he was sitting next." "And we shall have that silly ass Armour captain of the House." "Ye gods!" A small crowd had gathered in front of the studies on the first night of the Easter term. Consternation reigned. The almost impossible had happened. Lovelace major had passed into Sandhurst at his fifth attempt, and Armour would take his place as house captain. It was a disaster. Armour was doubtless a most worthy fellow, a thoroughly honest, hard-working forward. But he had no personality. When he passed by, fags did not suddenly stop talking, as they did when Clarke or Meredith rolled past them. The term before, he had not even been a house prefect. The Three Cock, which had once seemed such a certainty, now became a forlorn hope. "It's rotten," said Lovelace minor that night in the dormitory. "My brother didn't think he had the very ghost of a chance of passing. He'd mucked it up four times running, only the silly ass had done both the unseens with "the Bull" the week before, and he was too damned slack to alter them, and write them down wrong. He always was an ass, my brother." Everyone was sorry. Even "the Bull" regarded him with a sort of indulgent sentimentality. He never saw very much good in a School House captain as long as he was there; but as soon as he left, all his faults were forgotten and virtues that he had never possessed were flung at him in profusion. The result was that "the Bull" said to the School House captain of each generation: "I have had more trouble with you than any Fernhurst boy I have ever met. You can't see beyond the length of your own dining-hall. See big. See the importance of Fernhurst, and the insignificance of yourself."