thrown at the boys by the porter, before they could get the ball out
again. These compliments, you may be quite sure, the boys did not fail
to return with interest: Tom Channing, in particular, being charmingly
polite.

"And the saucy young beast'll be the senior boy soon!" foamed Mr.
Ketch, as the lot decamped. "I wish I could get him gagged, I do!"

"No, he will not," said Joe Jenkins, speaking impulsively in his
superior knowledge. "Yorke is to be senior."

"How do you know that, Joe?" asked his father.

Joe replied by relating what he had heard said by the Lady Augusta that
afternoon. It did not conciliate the porter in the remotest degree: he
was not more favourably inclined to Gerald Yorke than he was to Tom
Channing. Had he heard the school never was to have a senior again, or
a junior either, that might have pleased him.

But on the following morning, when he fell into dispute with the boys
in the cloisters, he spoke out his information in a spirit of triumph
over Huntley. Bit by bit, angered by the boys' taunts, he repeated
every word he had heard from Jenkins. The news, as it was busily
circulated from one to the other, caused no slight hubbub in the
school, and gave rise to that explosion of Tom Channing's at the
dinner-table.

Huntley sought Jenkins, as he had said he would do, and received
confirmation of the report, so far as the man's knowledge went. But
Jenkins was terribly vexed that the report had got abroad through him.