d at
twelve of a winter's night by telling him his house was a-fire."

It is not always easy to appreciate a joke of the practical order if
one has been made even merely part victim of it. Mike, as he reflected
that he had been dragged out of his house in the middle of the night,
in contravention of all school rules and discipline, simply in order
to satisfy Mr. Barley's sense of humour, was more inclined to be
abusive than mirthful. Running risks is all very well when they are
necessary, or if one chooses to run them for one's own amusement, but
to be placed in a dangerous position, a position imperilling one's
chance of going to the 'Varsity, is another matter altogether.

But it is impossible to abuse the Barley type of man. Barley's
enjoyment of the whole thing was so honest and child-like. Probably it
had given him the happiest quarter of an hour he had known for years,
since, in fact, the affair of old Tom Raxley. It would have been cruel
to damp the man.

So Mike laughed perfunctorily, took back the envelope with the five
pounds, accepted a stone ginger beer and a plateful of biscuits, and
rode off on his return journey.

* * * * *

Mention has been made above of the difference which exists between
getting into an inn after lock-up and into a private house. Mike was
to find this out for himself.

His first act on arriving at Sedleigh was to replace his bicycle in
the shed. This he accomplished with success. It was pitch-dark in the
shed, and as he wheeled his machine in, his foot touched something on
the floor. Without waiting to discover what this might be, he leaned
his bicycle against the wall, went out, and locked the door, after
which he ran across to Outwood's.

Fortune had favoured his undertaking by decreeing that a stout
drain-pipe should pass up the wall within a few inches of his and
Psmith's study. On the first day of term, it may be remembered he
had wrenched away the wooden bar which bisected the window-frame,
thus rendering exit and entrance almost as simple as they had been
for Wyatt during Mike's first term at Wrykyn.

He proceeded to scale this water-pipe.

He had got about half-way up when a voice from somewhere below cried,
"Who's that?"

CHAPTER XLV

PURSUIT

These things are Life's Little Difficulties. One can never tell
precisely how one will act in a sudden emergency. The right thing for
Mike to have done at this crisis was to have ig