It had not been a good term for either. Thank heaven, as they sat
there, they had honesty enough left to know it, and hope enough left to
feel there might still be a chance. They were not to jump by one leap
into the perfect schoolboy; still, with honesty and hope left, who shall
say they had lost all?

As to their immediate care, the examination--their last lingering
expectation of getting their remove slowly vanished before those
ruthless questions, all of which they knew they ought to know, but many
of which they discovered they knew nothing about.

Other boys, like Aspinall, who, with all his tears and terrors, had
struggled through the term more of a hero than either of his doughty
protectors, found the time only too short to answer all they had to
answer; and our two dejected ones, as they looked round, and saw the
fluency of every one else, felt themselves, like sediment, gradually
sinking to their level. As long as the stir of term life had lasted,
they had imagined themselves as well up, even better than most of their
contemporaries; but now they began to find out it was not so.

The suspense, if they felt any, was not long. Two days after the
examination, at the time when the Sixth and Fifth were passing through
their ordeal, the new boys' list came out.

Aspinall was first, and got his well-deserved remove, with a compliment
from the Doctor into the bargain, which made his pale face glow with
pleasure. Dick, with a sturdy effort to look cheerful, waved his
congratulations across the Hall, and then settled down to hear the
almost interminable string of names before his or Georgie's broke the
monotony.

In their own minds, and in the modesty of their own self-abasement, they
had fixed on the twentieth place, or thereabouts, for Heathcote, and
about the twenty-fifth for Dick. Alas! the singles grew into the teens,
and the teens into the twenties, and the twenties into the thirties
before the break came. After eighteen every one knew that the removes
were exhausted, and that the list which followed was, if not a list of
reproach, at any rate one neither of honour nor profit.

"31--Richardson," read the Doctor, making a pause on the announcement
which cut the penitent Dick to the quick; "32--Fox; 33--Sumpter; 34--
Whiles; 35--Heathcote; 36--Hooker, junior. That is all."

Poor Heathcote! He had buoyed himself up to the last. He had reminded
himself that he was not a prig or a saint, that he didn't