When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in hand for Balliol, he found himself unable to say if this aspirant¹ had really such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten² of his own long association with an intensely living little mind. From Morgan he heard half a dozen times: the boy wrote charming young letters, a patchwork³ of tongues, with indulgent postscripts⁴ in the family Volapuk and, in little squares and rounds and crannies of the text, the drollest illustrations — letters that he was divided between the impulse to show his present charge as a vain, a wasted incentive⁵, and the sense of something in them that publicity⁶ would profane⁷. The opulent youth went up in due course and failed to pass; but it seemed to add to the presumption⁸ that brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his parents, condoning⁹ the lapse¹⁰, which they good-naturedly treated as little as possible as if it were Pemberton’s, should have sounded the rally again, begged the young coach to renew the siege.

The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three louis, and he sent her a post-office order even for a larger amount. In return for this favour he received a frantic¹¹ scribbled¹² line from her: “Implore you to come back instantly — Morgan dreadfully ill.” They were on there

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