they moved along together at the foot of their classes in an enforced companionship that was contemptuously kindly on Conroy's side and at once grateful and resentful on Don's.
Then one day the cousin came to school with the whole story of Don's flirtation with Miss Margaret—a story he had learned from the dinner-table talk of his elders on the previous evening. It was now three years since she had passed out of their lives, but Conroy still remembered her aversion to his "face" and her whole-hearted admiration of Don; and to the older point of view which he had newly caught, Don's whole affair had been a ridiculous childishness that had ended in the still mor ridiculous fiasco of the torn photograph and Miss Margaret's indifferent departure.
It was shameful to Don when it was brought up to him again, and he blushed and suffered bashfully under his cousin's public teasing. "Did she use to kiss you in the summer-house?" the others twitted him. "Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie," they called him. "Go and play with the girls and give them your photograph."
He silenced some of the younger ones by boxing their ears; he was even irritated into fighting a boy of his own height, and was only saved from a beating by Conroy's interference. But the cousin kept up his own teasing, day after day; and when Saturday came Don went out alone to his haunts in the Park, almost a persecuted refugee from the small society of the neighbourhood.
It was a clear June morning, with a breeze that
