dered and horrified
manner for mere acting.

Railsford felt that this was a time of all others to be explicit.

"I did not do it, Arthur, and I had no more connection with the affair
than--your father."

Arthur was duly impressed by this asseveration.

"It's a precious rum thing, then, about all those things, you know.
They looked awfully fishy against you."

"What things? I don't understand you."

"Perhaps I'd better not tell you," said the boy, getting puzzled
himself.

"I can't force you to tell me; but when you know it's a matter of great
importance to me to know how you or anybody came to suspect such a thing
of me, I think you will do it."

Arthur thereupon proceeded to narrate the history of the finding of the
match-box, sack, and wedge of paper, with which the reader is already
familiar, and considerably astonished his worthy listener by the
business-like way in which he appeared to have put two and two together,
and to have laid the crime at his, Railsford's, door.

Nothing would satisfy the boy now but to go up and fetch down the
incriminating articles and display them in the presence of the late
criminal.

To his wrath and amazement, when he went to the cupboard he found--what
it had been the lot of a certain classical personage to find before
him--that the "cupboard was bare." The articles were nowhere to be
seen. Dig, on being charged with their abstraction, protested that he
had never set eyes on them, and when Arthur told him the purpose for
which they were wanted, he was scarcely less concerned at the mysterious
disappearance than his friend.

Arthur finally had to return to Railsford without the promised evidence.

"I can't make it out," said he; "they're gone."

"Did anyone know about this except yourself?"

"Dig knew," said Arthur, "and _he_ must have collared them."

"Who? Oakshott?"

"Oh no; but I happened to say something last term, just after that trial
we had, you know; I was talking about it, on the strict quiet, of
course, to Felgate."

"Felgate!" exclaimed the master; and the whole truth flashed upon him at
once.

"Yes, he promised to keep it dark. I really didn't think there was any
harm, you know, as he is a prefect."

"You think he has taken the things, then?"

"Must have," said Arthur. "I don't know why, though; I'll go and ask
him."

"You had better not," said Railsford. If Felgate had taken them, he
probably had some reason, and there was no occasion t