Burgess sighed and relit his pipe. I know few men who smoke more matches.
"The fatherless child is in God's keeping," answered Burgess. He turned to Dainton and murmured, "You recall the Liberator?"
Dainton's eyebrows moved up in quick surprise. "Oh, poor boy!" he ejaculated. It was some while before I was to understand the allusion or the comment, and I had little time now to speculate, as Burgess turned to address me.
"Laddie, he will be in Mr. Matheson's house, and will sit at the feet of Mr. Villiers in the Under Sixth. Were I a just man, I would place him in the Sixth, but I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this world. He must learn humility of spirit. He must fag--like Dainton minor; and be flogged like Dainton minor if he break our foolish rules. He must wait for a study and suffer on the altar of sport in all weathers, as a hundred thousand have done before him. I have communed secretly with thee, laddie, and, when thou goest hence to thine own place, lo! it will be forgotten as a dream that is past."
"Forget not this one thing," he added. "He is a stranger within our gates, having neither kith nor kin. Much will he teach us; somewhat, maybe, can we teach him. Make his path smooth, laddie."
"I'll do my best, sir," I promised. "Where's he going to be till term begins?"
"The Lord will provide," answered Burgess absently. It was his invariable formula when at a loss for a more suitable reply.
"Look here, Dr. Burgess," he suggested. "Why shouldn't I take charge of him for a night and a day?"
"A night and a day are twenty-four hours," he said.
"We shall be nine to one," answered Dainton reassuringly.
Burgess rose from his chair and rang the bell. A moment later the door opened, and O'Rane entered the library. He was a boy of medium height with black hair parted in the middle, after the American fashion, unusually large black eyes and bronzed face and hands. Though the black eyes sometimes lost their dreaminess and became charged with sudden passion, though the sunken cheeks and sharply outlined bones of the face gave him something of a starving animal's desperation, the reality was considerably less formidable than I had imagined from Burgess's description. In manner he was a curious mixture of the old and new. On being introduced, he drew himself up and clicked his heels, and in speaking he showed a tendency to gesticulate; then without warning his voice would take on a Western drawl, and unexpected transatlanticisms would crop up in his speech.