"Oh, he had breakfast with Heriot, too; didn't I tell you?"
"Well, I never supposed it would interest you."
"Although I told you I knew something about him at home!"
The two were facing each other, eye to eye. Those of Jan were filled with a furious suspicion.
"I wonder you didn't speak to him just now," remarked Carpenter, looking at his nails.
"He never saw me; besides, I'd gone and said all I'd got to say to him yesterday in his study."
"Didn't Devereux tell you I'd been to see him?"
"Oh, I think he said he'd seen you, but that was all."
"Has he told you anything about me at home, Chips?"
"Only that he hardly knew you; that was all," declared Carpenter, looking Jan in the face once more. "And I must say I don't see what you're driving at, Rutter!"
"You'd better go and ask Devereux," said Jan, unworthily; but, as luck would have it, he could not have diverted his companion's thoughts more speedily if he had tried.
"Devereux? I don't go near him!" he cried. "He promised to wait for me after chapel, and he cut me for those fellows we saw him with just now."
"Although you were friends at the same private school?"
"If you call that friendship! He never wrote to me all last term, though I wrote twice to him!"
"I suppose that would be why Heriot asked you both to breakfast," said Jan, very thoughtfully, as they began walking back together. "I mean, you both coming from the same school."
Jan threw one narrow look over his shoulder.
"Of course it was!" he agreed, and walked on nodding to himself.
"But he didn't know Evan Devereux, or he'd have known that an old friend was nothing to him!"
"I wouldn't be too sure," said Jan with gentle warmth. "I wouldn't be too sure, if I were you."
By the beginning of October there was a bite in the air, and either fives or football every afternoon; and before the middle of the month Jan began now and then to feel there might be worse places than a public school. He had learnt his way about. He could put a name to all his house and form. He was no longer strange; and on the whole he might have disliked things more than he did. There was much that he did dislike, instinctively and individually; but there was a good deal that he could not help enjoying, over and above the football and the fives. There was the complete freedom out of school, the complete privacy of the separate study, above all the amazing absence of anything in the way of espionage by the masters. These were all surprises to Jan; but they were counterbalanced by some others, such as the despotic powers of the præpostors, which only revived the spirit of sensitive antagonism in which he had come to school. The præpostors wore straw hats, had fags, and wielded hunting-crops to keep the line at football matches. This was a thing that made Jan's blood boil; he marvelled that no one else seemed to take it as an indignity, or to resent the authority of these præpostors as he did. Then there were boys like Shockley whom he could cheerfully have attended on the scaffold. And there was one man he very soon detested more than any boy.