But there was quite a difference between welcoming his success at other schools and serving under his leadership in their own.  Tar had frequently given him lines, and Squirts had boxed his ears.  They could not imagine how the Chapter had made such a mistake.  No one could be expected to forget that he was the son of a bankrupt linendraper, and the alcoholism of Cooper seemed to increase the disgrace.  It was understood that the Dean had supported his candidature with zeal, so the Dean would probably ask him to dinner; but would the pleasant little dinners in the precincts ever be the same when Tom Perkins sat at the table?  And what about the depot?  He really could not expect officers and gentlemen to receive him as one of themselves.  It would do the school incalculable harm.  Parents would be dissatisfied, and no one could be surprised if there were wholesale withdrawals.  And then the indignity of calling him Mr. Perkins!  The masters thought by way of protest of sending in their resignations in a body, but the uneasy fear that they would be accepted with equanimity restrained them.

“The only thing is to prepare ourselves for changes,” said Sighs, who had conducted the fifth form for five and twenty years with unparalleled incompetence.

And when they saw him they were not reassured.  Dr. Fleming invited them to meet him at luncheon.  He was now a man of thirty-two, tall and lean, but with the same wild and unkempt look they remembered on him as a boy.  His clothes, ill-made and shabby, were put on untidily.  His hair was as black and as long as ever, and he had plainly never learned to brush it; it fell over his forehead with every gesture, and he had a quick movement of the hand with which he pushed it back from his eyes.  He had a black moustache and a beard which came high up on his face almost to the cheek-bones, He talked to the masters quite easily, as though he had parted from them a week or two before; he was evidently delighted to see them.  He seemed unconscious of the strangeness of the position and appeared not to notice any oddness in being addressed as Mr. Perkins.

When he bade them good-bye, one of the masters, for something to say, remarked that he was allowing himself plenty of time to catch his train.

“I want to go round and have a look at the shop,” he answered cheerfully.

There was a distinct embarrassment.  They wondered that he could be so tactless, and to make it worse Dr. Fleming had not heard what he said.  His wife shouted it in his ear.

“He wants to go round and look at his father’s old shop.”

Only Tom Perkins was unconscious of the humiliation which the whole party felt.  He turned to Mrs. Fleming.

“Who’s got it now, d’you know?”

She could hardly answer.  She was very angry.

“It’s still a linendraper’s,” she said bitterly.  “Grove is the name.  We don’t deal there any more.”

“I wonder if he’d let me go over the house.”