“I am sure that if we meet again he will do me a bad turn if possible.  I regard him as being in some sort of way my evil genius.  I own that it is foolish and absurd, but I cannot get over the feeling.”

“Oh, it is absurd, Captain Mallett,” the girl said.  “He may have beaten you in little things, but you won the Victoria Cross in the Crimea, and everyone knows that you are one of the best shots in the country, and that before you went away you were always in the first flight with the hounds.”

“Ah, you are an enthusiast, Bertha.  I don’t say that I cannot hold my own with most men at a good many things where not brains, but brute strength and a quick eye are the only requisites, but I am quite convinced that if that fellow had been in the Redan that day, he would have got the Victoria Cross, and I should not.  There is no doubt about his pluck, and if it had only been to put me in the shade he would have performed some brilliant action or other that would have got it for him.  He is a better rider than I am, at any rate a more reckless one, and he is a better shot, too.  He is incomparably more clever.”

“I cannot believe it, Captain Mallett.”

“It is quite true, Bertha, and to add to it all, he is a remarkably handsome fellow, a first-rate talker, and when he pleases can make himself wonderfully popular.”

“He must be a perfect Crichton, Captain Mallett.”

“The worst of it is, Bertha, although I am ashamed of myself for thinking so, I have never been able to divest myself of the idea that he did not play fair.  There were two or three queer things that happened at school in which he was always suspected of having had a hand, though it was never proved.  I was always convinced that he used cribs, and partly owed his place to them.  I was jealous enough to believe that the Latin verses he sent in were written for him by Rigby, who was one of the monitors, and a great dab at verses.  Rigby was a great chum of his, for he was a mean fellow, and my rival was always well supplied with money, and to do him justice, liberal with it.

“Then, just before we left school, he carried off the prize in swimming.  He was a good swimmer, but I was a better.  I thought myself for once certain to beat him, but an hour before the race I got frightful cramps, a thing that I never had before or since, and I could hardly make a fight at all.  I thought at the time, and I have thought since, that I must have taken something at breakfast that disagreed with me horribly, and that he somehow put it in my tea.

“Then again in that matter of the Sculls at Henley.  I never felt my boat row so heavily as it did then.  When it was taken out of the water it was found that a piece of curved iron hoop was fixed to the bottom by a nail that had been pushed through the thin skin.  It certainly was not there when it was on the rack, but it was there when I rowed back to the boathouse, and it could only have got there by being put on as the boat was being lowered into the water.  There were three or four men helping to lower her down—­two of them friends of mine, two of them fellows employed at the boathouse.  While it lay in the water, before I got in and took my place, anyone stooping over it might unobserved have passed his hand under it and have pushed the nail through.