In truth the thrashing had had an extraordinary effect on Richard Haddon.  For a boy to be kicked, or clouted, or tweaked by strange men is the fortune of war—­it is a mere everyday incident, the natural and accepted fate of all boys, and is swiftly resented with a jibe or a missile and forgotten on the spot; but to be taken in cold blood by one strange man, not a schoolmaster or in any way privileged, and deliberately and systematically larruped with a belt under the eyes of another, is burning shame.  It tortured all Dick’s senses into revolt, and awakened in him a hatred of what he looked upon as the injustice and cowardliness of the outrage that was too deep and too bitter for trivial complaints.

Dick’s temperament was poignantly romantic, and the natural tendency had been fed and nourished by indiscriminate reading.  The Waddy Public Library, in point of fact, was largely responsible for many of the minor worries and big troubles Dick had been instrumental in visiting on the township.  The ‘lib’ry’ was in the hands of a few men whose literary tastes were decidedly crude, with a strong leaning towards piracy on the high seas, brigandage, buccaneering, and sudden death.  Dick read all print that came in his way.  Once he started a book he felt in honour bound to finish it, however difficult the task.  To set it aside would be a confession of mental weakness.  For this reason he had once, during a week of humiliation, fought his way stubbornly through Tupper’s ‘Proverbial Philosophy.’  But it was the rampant fiction that influenced him most directly.  He took his romance very seriously; his vivid sympathies were always with the poor persecuted pirate driven to lawless courses by systematic oppression at school, or by a cold proud father’s failure to appreciate the humour of his youthful villainies.  The bushranger, too, urged from milder courses of crime by the persecutions of the police, found in Dick a devoted friend.  It never occurred to the boy that the excuses given were anything but adequate and satisfactory justification for pillage and arson and homicide.

On leaving Dick’s room, Mrs. Haddon locked the door very carefully and quietly.  She suspected that he was planning mischief that would lead to further trouble, and hoped that by next morning he would be in a frame of mind to be won over by a little motherly strategy.  But she went about her work with a heavy heart.  Later she took the impenitent young ‘duffer’ a tea cunningly designed to appeal to his rebellious heart, and spread it neatly on the big dimity-covered box in his bedroom; but Dick was implacable.

In the evening the widow had a visitor in whom she could confide without reservation.  Christina Shine had called about her new dress for the Sunday School anniversary, and the weakest and most indulgent of mothers could not have wished for a more sympathetic confidant than big Miss Chris, who saved all her tears for other people’s troubles.