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A lonely child was Tony, gentle and biddable enough, quick at his books, and happiest in his school hours, when people let him alone, and he succeeded in pleasing the clever, testy schoolmaster, whose life was embittered by a constant struggle with an overwhelming desire to whack the young demons who tormented him. He had been “summonsed” twice by irate parents; so now he restrained himself at the expense of his teaching powers and his nerves generally.

Tony stopped in the middle of the road and smacked his pocket.

“I’ll go to the baths to-morrow morning,” he said aloud, “and see them young nobs swim; it’s only threepence before nine.”

A great excitement—unshared, unmentioned—had lately come into Tony’s life. Every morning for the last week, about eight o’clock he had watched for two boys who went by on bicycles with towels strapped on to their handle-bars. One was quite a little boy, far less than Tony himself; the other bigger, and in his eyes less interesting; and in a few minutes after them came one for whom Tony had conceived the extravagant, unreasoning admiration children will sometimes lavish on somebody with whom they have never exchanged, or hope to exchange, two words; someone unconscious of their existence as they are the richer for that other’s.