"I think you are rather reckoning without our friend Pip. He hasn't an ounce of jealousy or meanness in his composition. Linklater will behave like the young sweep that he is, but Pip will back Ellis through thick and thin. Just you see if he don't. Cheer up, old man, and we trample on the County and St. Dunstan's yet!"
The school had already regretfully resigned themselves to the prospect of not having Pip as Captain of the Eleven, but the news that Linklater had been barred too created a storm that was not allayed for some weeks. Linklater, much to his own gratification, found himself a hero, and without ado collected around him a band of sympathisers of the baser sort, who assured him twenty times a day that he was the only "sportsman"—overworked word!—in the school, and asserted with
