'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
school under shadow of the master.

She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
lesson? They want it.'

His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence
Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild
at his games.

My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This
fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'

Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
exercise.'

'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
cricket.'