He looked at the nag’s ears as he said it; and, being up to John Fry’s ways, I knew that it was a lie.  And my heart fell like a lump of lead, and I leaned back on the stay of the gate, and longed no more to fight anybody.  A sort of dull power hung over me, like the cloud of a brooding tempest, and I feared to be told anything.  I did not even care to stroke the nose of my pony Peggy, although she pushed it in through the rails, where a square of broader lattice is, and sniffed at me, and began to crop gently after my fingers.  But whatever lives or dies, business must be attended to; and the principal business of good Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another.

“Come up, Jack,” said one of the boys, lifting me under the chin; “he hit you, and you hit him, you know.”

“Pay your debts before you go,” said a monitor, striding up to me, after hearing how the honour lay; “Ridd, you must go through with it.”

“Fight, for the sake of the junior first,” cried the little fellow in my ear, the clever one, the head of our class, who had mocked John Fry, and knew all about the aorists, and tried to make me know it; but I never went more than three places up, and then it was an accident, and I came down after dinner.  The boys were urgent round me to fight, though my stomach was not up for it; and being very slow of wit (which is not chargeable on me), I looked from one to other of them, seeking any cure for it.  Not that I was afraid of fighting, for now I had been three years at Blundell’s, and foughten, all that time, a fight at least once every week, till the boys began to know me; only that the load on my heart was not sprightly as of the hay-field.  It is a very sad thing to dwell on; but even now, in my time of wisdom, I doubt it is a fond thing to imagine, and a motherly to insist upon, that boys can do without fighting.  Unless they be very good boys, and afraid of one another.

“Nay,” I said, with my back against the wrought-iron stay of the gate, which was socketed into Cop’s house-front:  “I will not fight thee now, Robin Snell, but wait till I come back again.”

“Take coward’s blow, Jack Ridd, then,” cried half a dozen little boys, shoving Bob Snell forward to do it; because they all knew well enough, having striven with me ere now, and proved me to be their master—­they knew, I say, that without great change, I would never accept that contumely.  But I took little heed of them, looking in dull wonderment at John Fry, and Smiler, and the blunderbuss, and Peggy.  John Fry was scratching his head, I could see, and getting blue in the face, by the light from Cop’s parlour-window, and going to and fro upon Smiler, as if he were hard set with it.  And all the time he was looking briskly from my eyes to the fist I was clenching, and methought he tried to wink at me in a covert manner; and then Peggy whisked her tail.

“Shall I fight, John?” I said at last; “I would an you had not come, John.”