“Certainly not by me,” said Mr. Ogilvie.  “I had hoped that the standard of honour had been raised, but it is very hard to mete the exact level of the schoolboy code from the outside.”

“And your John and mine have never given in to it,” added Caroline.

“What do you propose to do, Mr. Ogilvie?” said the Colonel.  “I shall do my part with my boy as a father.  What will you do with him and the other bully, who I find was Cripps.”

“I shall see Cripps’s father first.  I think it might be well if we both saw him before deciding on the form of discipline.  We have to think not only of justice but of the effect on their characters.”

“That’s the modern system,” said the Colonel indignantly.  “Fine work it would make in the army.  I know when punishment is deserved.  I don’t set up to be Providence, to know exactly what work it is to do.  I leave that to my Maker and do my duty.”

He was cut short by his son Joe rushing in headlong, exclaiming—-

“Papa, papa, please come!  Rob has knocked Johnny down and he doesn’t come round.”

Colonel Brownlow hurried off, Caroline trying to make him hear her offer to follow if she could be useful, and sending Jock to see whether there was any opening for her.  Unless the emergency were very great indeed she knew her absence would be preferred, and so she and Mr. Ogilvie remained, talking the matter over, with more pity for the delinquent than his own family would have thought natural.

“It really is a terrible thing to be stupid,” she said.  “I don’t imagine that unlucky boy ever entered into his father’s idea of truth and honour, which really is fine in its way.”

“Very fine, and proved to have made many fine fellows in its time.  I dare say the lad will grow up to it, but just now he simply feels cruelly injured by interference with a senior’s claim to absolute submission.”

“Which he sees as singly as his father sees the simple duty of justice.”

“It would be comfortable if we poor moderns could deal out our measures with that straightforward military simplicity.  I cannot help seeing in that unfortunate boy the victim of examinations for commissions.  Boys must be subjected to high pressure before they can thoroughly enter into the importance of the issues that depend upon it; and when a sluggish, dull intellect is forced beyond endurance, there is an absolute instinct of escape, impelling to shifts and underhand ways of eluding work.  Of course the wrong is great, but the responsibility rests with the taskmaster in the same manner as the thefts of a starved slave might on his owner.”

“The taskmaster being the country?”

“Exactly so.  Happy those boys who have available brains, like yours.”

“Ah!  I am very sorry about Bobus; what ought I to do?”

“Hardly more than write a few words of warning, since the change may probably have put an end to the practice.”