stares after him for a moment, and then slowly goes on his
way, breathing hard.

"I wonder," said Pembury, after a long silence--"I wonder, Wray, if it's
possible we are wrong about that fellow?"

Wraysford says nothing.

"He doesn't act like a guilty person. Just fancy, Wray,"--and here Tony
pulls up short, in a state of perturbation--"just fancy if you and I and
the rest have been making fools of ourselves all the term!"

Ah! my Fifth Form heroes, just fancy!

CHAPTER THIRTY.

A NEW TURN OF THE TIDE.

The three weeks of Christmas holiday darted past only too rapidly for
most of the boys at Saint Dominic's. Holidays have a miserable knack of
sliding along. The first few days seem delightfully long. Then, after
the first week, the middle all of a sudden becomes painfully near. And
the middle once passed, they simply tear, and bolt, and rush pitilessly
on to the end, when, lo and behold! your time is up before you well knew
it had begun.

So it happened with most of the boys. With one or two, however, the
holiday dragged heavily, and one of these was Master Thomas Senior.
This forlorn youth, no longer now rollicking Tom of the Fifth, but the
meek and mild, and withal sulky, hopeful of the Reverend Thomas Senior,
D.D., of Saint Dominic's, watched the last of his chums go off with
anything but glee. He was doomed to three weeks' kicking of his heels
in the empty halls and playgrounds of Saint Dominic's, with nothing to
do and no one to do it with. For the boy's mother was ill, which kept
the whole family at home, and Tom's baby brother, vivacious youth as he
was, was hardly of a companionable age yet.

As to the Doctor (Tom, by the way, even in the bosom of his family,
always thought and talked of his father as the "Doctor")--as for the
Doctor, well, Tom was inclined to shirk the risk of more _tete-a-tetes_
than he could possibly help with so formidable a personage, even though
he _was_ his own parent.

But try all he could, Tom was let in for it once, when he found himself
face to face one day at dinner with the Doctor, and no third person to
help him out.

The occasion was quite early in the holidays, and was indeed about the
first opportunity the father had had since breaking-up for anything like
a conversation with his affable son.

Tom's conversational powers were never very brilliant, and when in the
subduing presence of his father they always dwindled down to nothing.
It was, therefore,