stop; but
you come up after prayers to our study. You know young Arthur. We've got
Gray's study. We'll have a good supper and talk about bird-nesting."

Martin was evidently highly pleased at the invitation, and promised to
be up without fail.

As soon as prayers were over, and the sixth and fifth form boys had
withdrawn to the aristocratic seclusion of their own room, and the rest,
or democracy, had sat down to their supper in the hall, Tom and Arthur,
having secured their allowances of bread and cheese, started on their
feet to catch the eye of the prepostor of the week, who remained in
charge during supper, walking up and down the hall. He happened to be an
easy-going fellow, so they got a pleasant nod to their "Please may I go
out?" and away they scrambled to prepare for Martin a sumptuous banquet.
This Tom had insisted on, for he was in great delight on the occasion,
the reason of which delight must be expounded. The fact was that this
was the first attempt at a friendship of his own which Arthur had made,
and Tom hailed it as a grand step. The ease with which he himself became
hail-fellow-well-met with anybody, and blundered into and out of twenty
friendships a half-year, made him sometimes sorry and sometimes angry at
Arthur's reserve and loneliness. True, Arthur was always pleasant, and
even jolly, with any boys who came with Tom to their study; but Tom felt
that it was only through him, as it were, that his chum associated
with others, and that but for him Arthur would have been dwelling in
a wilderness. This increased his consciousness of responsibility;
and though he hadn't reasoned it out and made it clear to himself yet
somehow he knew that this responsibility, this trust which he had taken
on him without thinking about it, head over heels in fact, was the
centre and turning-point of his school-life, that which was to make him
or mar him, his appointed work and trial for the time being. And Tom
was becoming a new boy, though with frequent tumbles in the dirt and
perpetual hard battle with himself, and was daily growing in manfulness
and thoughtfulness, as every high-couraged and well-principled boy must,
when he finds himself for the first time consciously at grips with self
and the devil. Already he could turn almost without a sigh from the
School-gates, from which had just scampered off East and three or four
others of his own particular set, bound for some jolly lark not quite
according to law, and invo