and finally charged him.  He had dodged it and got away; at the time it had seemed an immense feat to White and the others who were safely up the field.  He had walked to the fence, risking a second charge by his deliberation.  Then he had sat on the fence and declared his intention of always crossing the field so long as the bull remained there.  He had said this with white intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, and then suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence, struggled with heaving shoulders, and been sick.

The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak stomach had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.

On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same rather screwed-up sort.  He showed it not only in physical but in mental things.  A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious discussion in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination, professed an atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of Shelley.  This brought him into open conflict with Roddles, the History Master.  Roddles had discovered these theological controversies in some mysterious way, and he took upon himself to talk at Benham and Prothero.  He treated them to the common misapplication of that fool who “hath said in his heart there is no God.”  He did not perceive there was any difference between the fool who says a thing in his heart and one who says it in the dormitory.  He revived that delectable anecdote of the Eton boy who professed disbelief and was at once “soundly flogged” by his head master.  “Years afterwards that boy came back to thank ——­”

“Gurr,” said Prothero softly.  “Stew—­ard !”

“Your turn next, Benham,” whispered an orthodox controversialist.

“Good Lord!  I’d like to see him,” said Benham with a forced loudness that could scarcely be ignored.

The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head.  From it Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever.  “He said he would certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would certainly kill him if he did.”

“And then?”

“He told me to go away and think it over.  Said he would preach about it next Sunday. . . .  Well, a swishing isn’t a likely thing anyhow.  But I would. . . .  There isn’t a master here I’d stand a thrashing from—­not one. . . .  And because I choose to say what I think! . . .  I’d run amuck.”

For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a vain and ill-concealed hope that the head might try it just to see if Benham would.  It was tantalizingly within the bounds of possibility. . . .

These incidents came back to White’s mind as he turned over the newspapers in the upper drawer of the bureau.  The drawer was labelled “Fear—­the First Limitation,” and the material in it was evidently designed for the opening volume of the great unfinished book.  Indeed, a portion of it was already arranged and written up.