" said Oliver, glad of any diversion.

"Hum! As I feared--feverish. Oliver, my boy, you are not well.
Wandering a bit in your mind, too; get to bed. Be better soon. Able to
talk like an ordinary rational animal then, and not like an animated
tom-cat. Good-bye!"

And so saying he departed, leaving the friends too much amused to be
angry at his rudeness.

The two friends did a steady evening's work after this, and the thought
of the Nightingale Scholarship drove away for the time all less pleasant
recollections.

They slept, after it all, far more soundly than Loman, whose dreams were
disturbed by that everlasting top joint all the night long.

The reader will no doubt have already decided in his own mind whether
Oliver Greenfield did rightly or wrongly in putting his hands into his
pockets instead of using them to knock down Loman. It certainly did not
seem to have done him much good at the time. He had lost the esteem of
his comrades, he had lost the very temper he had been trying to keep--
twenty times since the event--and no one gave him credit for anything
but "the better part of valour" in the whole affair.

And yet that one effort of self-restraint was not altogether an unmanly
act. At least, so thought Wraysford that night, as he lay meditating
upon his friend's troubles, and found himself liking him none the less
for this latest singular piece of eccentricity.

CHAPTER TEN.

THE FOURTH JUNIOR AT HOME.

Stephen, before he had been a fortnight in the school, found himself
very much at home at Saint Dominic's. He was not one of those
exuberant, irrepressible boys who take their class-fellows by storm, and
rise to the top of the tree almost as soon as they touch the bottom.
Stephen, as the reader knows, was not a very clever boy, or a very
dashing boy, and yet he somehow managed to get his footing among his
comrades in the Fourth Junior, and particularly among his fellow
Guinea-pigs.

He had fought Master Bramble six times in three days during his second
week, and was engaged to fight him again every Tuesday, Thursday, and
Friday during the term. He had also taken the chair at one indignation
meeting against the monitors, and spoken in favour of a resolution at
another. He had distributed brandy-balls in a most handsome manner to
his particular adherents, and he had been the means of carrying away no
less than two blankets from the next dormitory. This was pretty good
for a fortnight. Ad