Jan with a German-silver pencil-case out of his journey money. And what made these signs so remarkable was that Jan himself had never been more glum than during the last days of the term, when all the rest were packing or looking up trains, and talking about their people and all they were going to do at home, and making Jan realise that he had no home and no people to call his own.
That was not perhaps a very fair or a grateful way of putting it, even to himself; but Jan had some excuse for the bitterness of his heart. He had not received above three letters from the rectory in all these thirteen weeks; the poverty of his correspondence had in fact become notorious, because he soon ceased looking for a letter, and when there was one for him it lay on the window-sill until some fellow told him it was there. This circumstance had provided the chivalrous Shockley with yet another taunt. Then that occasional letter never by any chance enclosed a post-office order, or heralded a hamper on its way by rail; and Jan had brought so little with him in the first instance, in the way either of eatables or of pocket-money, that a time had come when he flatly refused Chips's potted-meat because he saw no chance of ever having anything to offer him in return. These of course had been among the minor troubles of the term; but they were the very ones a fellow's people might have foreseen and remedied, if they had really been his people, or cared for a moment to do the thing properly while they were about it. But all they had done was to write three times to remind him of their charity in doing the thing at all, and to impress upon him what a chance in life he was getting all through them! That again was only Jan's view of their letters, and was perhaps as ungrateful and unfair as his whole
