He nodded negligently.

“All right.  I don’t mind.”

“P’r’aps, when he knows you’re standing up for me, he’ll leave me alone.”

“He’d better.”

“My name’s Rufus—­Rufus Cosgrave.  You see, I was born like this, and my father thought it would be a good joke.  I call it beastly.”

“Mine’s Robert.”

The red-haired boy meditated a little longer.  He rubbed his arm against Robert’s softly like a young pony.

“I say, let’s be friends—­shall we?”

Robert gulped and turned his head away.

“All right.  I don’t mind.”

They parted shyly at the corner of Cosgrave’s road—­a neat double file of vastly superior villas, as Robert realized with a faint sinking of the heart; but Robert did not go home.  He made his way out to the dingy fields behind the biscuit factory, and watched the local rag and bobtail play football, lying hidden in the long grass under the wall so that they should not see him and fall upon him.  Even when it grew dusk and he knew that Christine must be almost home, he still wandered about the streets.  He was hungry and footsore, his head and body ached, but he put off the moment when he would have to face her to the very last.  He loved her, and he was not really afraid, though he knew that the sight of his torn, blood-stained clothes would rouse her to a queer unreasonable despair; but he had talked so much, so proudly and so confidently of going to school.  And now, how should he tell the tale of his disgrace, how make clear to her the misery which the unfathomable gulf between himself and his companions caused in him, or that because a red-haired, freckled small boy had asked him to fight Dickson Minor he had lain in the grass with his face hidden in his arms and wept tears of sacred happiness?  There were things you could never tell, least of all to people whom you loved.  They were locked up in you, and the key had been lost long since.

The street lamps came to life one by one.  He strolled down Acacia Grove, whistling and swinging his legs with an exaggerated carelessness.  He could see their light in the upper window of No. 14.  He was sure that Christine would watch for him, and when the hall door opened suddenly, he stopped short, shrinking from their encounter.  But it was a man who came out of the gate towards him.  For one moment an awful, reasonless terror made him half turn to run, to run headlong, never to come back; the next, he recognized the slight, jerky limp which made his form master so comically bird-like, and stood still, knowing that now Christine had heard everything, the very worst.  Probably Mr. Ricardo had come to tell her that she must take him away, that he was too bad and too stupid to be with other boys, and a lump gathered in his throat because he would never see Rufus Cosgrave again:  never fight for him.

Mr. Ricardo halted, peering through the dusk.