"Hold your tongues, you fools!" he shrilled out to some boys who
interrupted him. "Don't you want to know anything, you ignorant swine?"

He was as ill-dressed as the rest of them, but he did not speak in the
Cockney dialect. If he was of the riffraff of the streets, as his
companions were, he was somehow different.

Then he, by chance, saw Marco, who was standing in the arched end of the
passage.

"What are you doing there listening?" he shouted, and at once stooped to
pick up a stone and threw it at him. The stone hit Marco's shoulder, but
it did not hurt him much. What he did not like was that another lad
should want to throw something at him before they had even exchanged
boy-signs. He also did not like the fact that two other boys promptly
took the matter up by bending down to pick up stones also.

He walked forward straight into the group and stopped close to the
hunchback.

"What did you do that for?" he asked, in his rather deep young voice.

He was big and strong-looking enough to suggest that he was not a boy it
would be easy to dispose of, but it was not that which made the group
stand still a moment to stare at him. It was something in himself--half
of it a kind of impartial lack of anything like irritation at the
stone-throwing. It was as if it had not mattered to him in the least.
It had not made him feel angry or insulted. He was only rather curious
about it. Because he was clean, and his hair and his shabby clothes were