“Wonderful!” I kept a serious face.  “And I suppose all this time you’ve been staring at me, amazed by the recklessness of your elders.”

He flushed slightly.  “Have I been staring?  I beg your pardon, I’m sure:  it’s a trick I have.  I begin thinking of things, and then—­”

“Thinking, I suppose, of how it would feel to be in a collision, or what it would be like to leap such a parapet as that and find ourselves dropping—­dropping—­into space?  But you shouldn’t, really.  It isn’t healthy in a boy like you:  and if you’ll listen to one who has known what nerves are, it may too easily grow to mean something worse.”

“But it isn’t that—­exactly,” he protested; “though of course all that comes into it.  I’m not a—­a funk, sir!  I was thinking more of the —­of what would come afterwards, you know.”

“Oh dear!” I groaned to myself.  “It’s worse than ever:  here’s a little prig worrying about his soul.  I shouldn’t advise you to trouble about that, either,” I said aloud.

“But I don’t trouble about it.”  He hesitated, and stumbled into a burst of confidence.  “You see, I’m no good at games—­athletics and that sort of thing—­”

Again he stopped, and I nodded to encourage him.

“And I’m no swell at schoolwork, either.  I went to school late, and after home it all seems so young—­if you understand?”

I thought I did.  With his polite grown-up manner I could understand his isolation among the urchins, the masters, and all the interests of an ordinary school.

“But my father—­you know him, don’t you?—­he’s disappointed about it.  He’d like me to bring home prizes or cups.  I don’t think he’d mind what it was, so long as he could be proud about it.  Of course he never says anything:  but a fellow gets to know.”

“I daresay you’re right,” I said.  “But what has this to do with insuring yourself for twenty thousand pounds?”

“Well, you see, I’m to go into the Bank some day:  and I expect my father thinks I shall be just as big a duffer at that.  I know he does.  But I’m not, if he’d only trust me a bit.  So now if we were to smash up—­collide, go off the rails, run over a bridge, or something of that sort—­just think how he’d feel when he found out I’d cleared twenty thousand by it!”

“So that’s what you were picturing to yourself?”

He nodded.  “That, and the smash, and all.  I kept saying, ’Now—­if it comes this moment?’ And I wondered a little how it would take you suddenly:  whether you’d start up or fall forward—­and if you would say anything.”

“You are a cheerful companion!”

He grinned politely.  “And afterwards—­just before the train stopped I had a splendid idea.  I began making my will.  You see, I know something about investments.  I read about them every day.”

“In the Boy’s Own Paper?”

“We take in the Standard in our school library, and I have it all to myself unless there’s a war on.  I’ve heard my father say often that it’s a very reliable paper, and so it is, for I’ve tried it for two years now.  So if I left a will telling just how the twenty thousand ought to be invested, it would open my father’s eyes more than ever.”