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He had been reasonably satisfied with the manner in which he had stopped the runaway, and might not have objected to a certain amount of publicity, provided it could have come in the right way. If some man, who had been a witness of the affair, should have met him on the street, and clapped him on the shoulder, and growled “Clever job you did, youngster!” or “Good work, son!”—why, that would have been all right, and quite in accord with his idea of the proprieties. But to be hugged and patted, and promised a pie, with his club-mates and others looking on, to say nothing of the principal—truly, Sam felt that his was a hard and undeserved fate.

His behavior was somewhat like that of most stricken creatures; that is, he sought solitude. He shunned the club. From school he went straight home, and there, curled up in a corner of the library, read or studied industriously. Even to his father and mother he said little, and to neither did he confide a syllable of his unhappy experience. This sort of thing went on for two or three days, with the natural result that by much brooding upon his troubles he magnified them out of all proportion, and made himself so genuinely miserable that, at last, he was driven in desperation to seek diversion. He tried to find it at the club, and again his luck was bad.