By-bye, my young Nightingales."

Loman's feelings can be more easily imagined than expressed when Cripps,
saying these words, held out his hand familiarly to be shaken. The boy
did shake it, as one would shake hands with a wolf, and then, utterly
ashamed and disgraced, he made his way among his wondering schoolfellows
up to the school.

Was this his luck, after all? A monitor known to be the companion and
familiar friend of the disreputable cad at the Cockchafer! The boy who,
if not liked, had yet passed among most of his schoolfellows as a
steady, well-conducted fellow, now suddenly shown up before the whole
school like this!

Loman went his way to his study, feeling that the mask was pretty nearly
off his face at last, and that Saint Dominic's knew him almost as he
really was. Yet did they know all?

As Loman passed Greenfield's study he stopped and peeped in at the door.
The owner was sitting in his armchair, with his feet upon the
mantelpiece, laughing over a volume of _Pickwick_ till the tears came.
And yet the crime Oliver was suspected of was theft and lying? Was it
not strange--must it not have struck Loman as strange, in all his
misery, that any one under such a cloud as Greenfield could think of
laughing, while _he_, under a cloud surely no greater, felt the most
miserable boy alive!

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.

A QUEER PRIZE-DAY.

The long Christmas term crawled slowly on unsatisfactorily to everybody.
It was unsatisfactory to Loman, who, after the football match,
discovered that what little popularity or influence he ever had was
finally gone. It was unsatisfactory to Wraysford, who, not knowing
whether to be ashamed of himself or wroth with his old friend, settled
down to be miserable for the rest of the term. It was unsatisfactory to
the Fifth, who felt the luck was against them, and that the cloud
overhead seemed to have stuck there for good. It was unsatisfactory to
Stephen, who raged and fretted twenty times a day on his brother's
behalf, and got no nearer putting him right than when he began. And
undoubtedly it must have been unsatisfactory to Oliver, a banished man,
forgetting almost the use of tongue and ears, and, except his brother,
not being able to reckon on a single friend at Saint Dominic's outside
the glorious community of the Guinea-pigs.

In fact, the only section in the school to whom the term was
satisfactory, was these last-named young gentlemen and their sworn foes,
the