There was a silence.

"Above it, I suppose?"

"Not a bit. Not up to it. I shall want a lot of coaching at that end net
of yours before I'm fit to play for Sedleigh."

There was another pause.

"Then you won't play?" asked Adair.

"I'm not keeping you, am I?" said Mike, politely.

It was remarkable what a number of members of Outwood's house appeared
to cherish a personal grudge against Mr. Downing. It had been that
master's somewhat injudicious practice for many years to treat his own
house as a sort of Chosen People. Of all masters, the most unpopular is
he who by the silent tribunal of a school is convicted of favoritism.
And the dislike deepens if it is a house which he favors and not merely
individuals. On occasions when boys in his own house and boys from other
houses were accomplices and partners in wrongdoing, Mr. Downing
distributed his thunderbolts unequally, and the school noticed it. The
result was that not only he himself, but also--which was rather
unfair--his house, too, had acquired a good deal of unpopularity.

The general consensus of opinion in Outwood's during the luncheon
interval was that having got Downing's up a tree, they would be fools
not to make the most of the situation.

Barnes's remark that he supposed, unless anything happened and wickets