was a keen school. As a whole, it both worked and played with energy.

All it wanted now was opportunity.

This Adair was determined to give it. He had that passionate fondness
for his school which every boy is popularly supposed to have, but which
really is implanted in about one in every thousand. The average
public-school boy _likes_ his school. He hopes it will lick Bedford at
Rugger and Malvern at cricket, but he rather bets it won't. He is sorry
to leave, and he likes going back at the end of the holidays, but as for
any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he would think it rather
bad form than otherwise. If anybody came up to him, slapped him on the
back, and cried, "Come along, Jenkins, my boy! Play up for the old
school, Jenkins! The dear old school! The old place you love so!" he
would feel seriously ill.

Adair was the exception.

To Adair, Sedleigh was almost a religion. Both his parents were dead;
his guardian, with whom he spent the holidays, was a man with neuralgia
at one end of him and gout at the other; and the only really pleasant
times Adair had had, as far back as he could remember, he owed to
Sedleigh. The place had grown on him, absorbed him. Where Mike,
violently transplanted from Wrykyn, saw only a wretched little hole not
to be mentioned in the same breath with Wrykyn, Adair, dreaming of the
future, saw a colossal establishment, a public school among public
schools, a lump of human radium, shooting out Blues and Balliol Scholars
year after year without ceasing.

It would not be so till long after he was gone and forgotten, but he did