Jack Raymond

"I don't know what you mean," Theo cried out again; and, wrenching his arm free, he dashed towards the gate.

"You're wonderfully i

Theo stopped short, stared at him silently for a moment, and burst into despairing sobs.

Jack had risen and was standing by the hedge. Something leaped out of darkness before his eyes: Treva

His fit of mad fury was over in a moment He found himself in the middle of a crowd, evidently called in from the other field by the cries of Stubbs. Three boys were on the ground, and a fourth, one of the monitors, was saying in a breathless, injured voice: "Well, Raymond, you do know how to use your fists, anyway!"

Jack looked round him helplessly; at Stubbs, spluttering and choking in a corner; at another boy whose nose was bleeding; at Theo, white-faced and scared. He put both hands up to his head; he was still dizzy, and felt, somehow, as if he were back in Porthcarrick.

"I'm... sorry," he said at last. "I lost my temper..."

He went slowly away, his head bent, his feet dragging in the grass. The puzzled boys looked at each other.

"There, stop sniffling!" said the monitor sharply to Stubbs. "And you, young shaver," he added, turning to Theo, "run after Raymond and give him his book; he's forgotten it."

As Theo ran off with the book, the moni­tor turned back to Stubbs.

"Look here! Raymond didn't start throt­tling you for nothing. The next time I catch you hanging about and bullying any of the little chaps, I'll punch your head myself. Now be off; we don't want cads here."

Stubbs slipped away, meekly enough. "Dirty little beast!" muttered the monitor.

After this incident Jack waked up to find that his position in the school was changed. He had been so indifferent to his surround­ings that he only now saw how universally Stubbs had for long been disliked and mis­trusted by the boys. If the masters heard anything of what had occurred, they kept silence; but Jack began slowly to realise that his unexpected championship of Theo had won for him both the goodwill of his school­fellows and the impassioned adoration of the small creature's self.

Theo trotted after him, indeed, like a "pet lap-dog," often grievously embarrassing his idol by the ways in which his affection expressed itself. Jack would find his night­shirt carefully smoothed and folded, new laces threaded into his boots, the right page turned down in his lesson books, and early primroses laid on his plate at breakfast. This last attention, however, was too much for his patience; and he snubbed the child so unmercifully that the monitors, disinclined as they were to tolerate friendships between little boys and big ones in the school, shrugged their shoulders and refrained from interfering. "The kid" was nothing worse than a blithering idiot, they decided, and Raymond was quite capable of putting him down.

But Theo's devotion was proof against a good deal of snubbing. "Little duffer!" Jack would mutter angrily when the child's name was mentioned; yet he submitted in time, though with a very bad grace, and grad­ ually came to be regarded as Theo's official protector and champion. "You'd better not bully the kid," one boy would say to another; "or Raymond'll cut your head open." As for Theo, once freed from persecution and satisfied as to the two prime necessities of his nature, a god for his worship and peace for violin practice, he flourished and expanded beyond all expectations, and even blossomed out into the use of English slang and the possession of a huge clasp-knife, fortunately too stiff for his small fingers to open.

His letters to his mother were filled with the praises of Jack. She could gain no definite idea as to the cause of the fight with Stubbs, for Theo, happily, had understood too little himself to be able to explain. On her next visit, however, she obtained from him an account, given in all i

Jack obeyed, with a scowling face. As if things were not bad enough already, he had got to go and be jawed at by the other fel­low's mother now.

He found her sitting alone, her thin hands folded on her lap. As he came in she looked up; and he stopped short and dropped his eyes, with a sudden rush of jealous hatred against her child. What right had Theo to have a mother like that, when other peo­ple had nothing? "Nothing, nothing," he repeated to himself with dolorous insistence, He had never realised how lonely he was till he saw the face of the "other fellow's mother," Her eyes were like the deep, still water in the shadowy pools of Treva

"Are you Jack?" she said. "I have heard so much of you from Theo; he can talk of nothing else."

"He's a little idiot," said Jack, flushing angrily. He would have given a year's pocket money to get out of the room. He resented her presence, though he could not have told himself why; the low voice with its foreign accent seemed to force itself on him against his will, and make him think of Molly, and the foam on the grey rocks by Deadman's Cliff, and the circling flight of sea gulls. She had no right to come in here and make him wretched again, just when he was begi

"He is rather a baby still," she said; "and knows nothing of the kind of danger you rescued him from. I could not go home without thanking you."

Jack set his teeth. How much more of this was he to bear? She was looking at him now with a serious, scrutinising gaze.

"I thought at first of taking him away; but I have been talking it over with Dr. Cross, and he suggests that, as you have al­ready been so kind, I should ask you to help me. Will you let me put the child under your care? Dr. Cross will see that the monitors understand, so you will have no difficulty; and I am quite sure it will be the best possible thing for Theo. An older schoolfellow, especially one he cares so much for, can protect him better than any master could do; and I know he will obey you. If you will take care of him, and not let him see or hear anything unfit for a little boy to know of, you will lift a heavy weight off my mind."

As she paused for his answer, Jack looked up. He was almost ready to burst out laugh­ing at the brutal joke which the fates were playing at his expense. He thought of the Bishop's knife, and the photographs, and the threat of a reformatory. Then suddenly a lump came in his throat as his eyes met hers, and he looked down again at the floor.

"All right," he said huskily; "I'll see to it. He shan't come to any harm while I'm here."

She gave him her hand. "Thank you," she said, and rose; then paused a moment, looking at him.

"Theo tells me that the boy you fought had called him a 'jail-bird.' Is that so?"

"Yes."

"Do you know why? "

Jack hesitated. He had overheard vague hints about Theo's father.

"No," he said; "I... don't talk much to the others; and, anyhow, it's not my business."

"Have you ever read any Polish history?"

"I... no, I don't think so."

"Theo must have said something, and been misunderstood. He doesn't remember much about it; he was only a little thing. My husband was a political exile — do you know what that is? — in Siberia. When he died there, I brought the child to France. I have always tried to keep the shadow of these things away from Theo; there will be time enough for them when he is a man."