[Hetty Wesley by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch]@TWC D-Link book
Hetty Wesley

CHAPTER I
2/11

But I was told it began up school, with Randall's flinging a book at young Murray for a lousy Scotch Jacobite." "H'm: and where will it be ?" The boy dropped his voice to a drawl.

"In Fighting-green, I believe, sir: they told me Poets' Corner was already bespoke for a turn-up between the Dean and Sall the charwoman, with the Head Verger for bottle-holder--" "Now, look here, young jackanapes--" But young jackanapes, catching sight of half a dozen boys--the vanguard of Hutton's--at the street corner, ducked himself free and raced from vengeance across the yard.
The old gentleman followed; and the crowd from Hutton's, surging past, showed him the way to Fighting-green where a knot of King's Scholars politely made room for him, perceiving that in spite of his small stature, his rusty wig and countrified brown suit, he was a person of some dignity and no little force of character.

They read it perhaps in the set of his mouth, perhaps in the high aquiline arch of his nose, which he fed with snuff as he gazed round the ring while the fighters rested, each in his corner, after the first round: for a mill at Westminster was a ceremonious business, and the Head Master had been known to adjourn school for one.
"H'm," said the newcomer; "no need to ask which is Wesley." His eyes set deep beneath brows bristling like a wire-haired terrier's--were on the boy in the farther corner, who sat on his backer's knee, shoeless, stripped to the buff, with an angry red mark on the right breast below the collar-bone; a slight boy and a trifle undersized, but lithe, clear-skinned, and in the pink of condition; a handsome boy, too.

By his height you might have guessed him under sixteen, but his face set you doubting.

There are faces almost uncannily good-looking: they charm so confidently that you shrink from predicting the good fortune they claim, and bethink you that the gods' favourites are said to die young: and Charles Wesley's was such a face.


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