“That you, Stonehouse?”

“Yes”—­he added painfully, because the little man had been kind to him—­“sir.”

“Your—­Miss Forsyth is getting anxious about you.  Why are you so late?”

Robert muttered “Football,” knowing it was a lie, and that somehow or other his companion knew it too.  He heard Mr. Ricardo sigh deeply and wearily.

“Well, I’m very late myself.  I don’t know this neighbourhood.  Is there a station or a ’bus near here?”

“There’s a ’bus.”  Robert pointed eagerly.  “I’ll show you if you like.”

“Thanks—­if it doesn’t take you too long.”

They walked side by side in silence, Mr. Ricardo’s stick tapping smartly on the pavement, he himself apparently deep in thought.  It seemed to Robert that he had escaped, until suddenly a thin hand took him by the shoulder and shook him with a friendly impatience.

“Football.  Nonsense.  A boy like you doesn’t play football.  He hasn’t had the chance.  Besides, it’s not his line.  He plays a lone game.  No.  You’ve been moping round—­crying possibly.  Well, I do that myself sometimes.  It’s a crying business, unless you’ve got nerves and guts.  But you’ve got that all right.  I saw you fight that stupid bully Saunders from my window, and you beat him, too.  I was fighting with you, though you didn’t know it.  It was I who kicked him that time you caught him on the shin.”

Robert would have laughed had he been less miserable, and had he not caught beneath Mr. Ricardo’s brief amusement a real and angry satisfaction.  In the dark, too, he had an uneasy feeling that after all he was going to be found out.

“And then after you’d stood up to and beaten a fellow twice your size you went away by yourself and howled.  Shall I tell you why?  You’ll be astonished.  Probably you won’t understand in the least.  You cried because you’re a young idiot.  You find yourself in a herd of half-baked living creatures, and you see that they are wearing chains round their ankles and rings through their noses so that they can’t move or breathe properly, and you think to yourself that that’s the proper thing, and you come crying home for someone to tie you up like the rest.  It’s natural.  It’s the race instinct and has had its uses.  But it’s dangerous.  It kills most of us.  We start out with brains to use and eyes to see with and hands to make with and we end up by thinking nothing and seeing nothing and making nothing that hasn’t been thought and seen and made for the last two thousand years.  Most of us, even when we know what is happening to us, are cowed and blackmailed into surrender.  We have to compromise—­there are circumstances—­always circumstances—­unless we are very strong—­we give in—­beaten out of shape——­”

His sentences, that had become painful and disjointed, broke off, and there was another silence.  Robert could say nothing.  He was dazed with the many words, half of which, it was true, he had not understood at all.  And yet they excited him.  They seemed to pierce through and touch some sleeping thing in himself which stirred and answered:  “Yes, yes, that’s true—­that’s true.”