re
afflicted with a troubled conscience.

Another slight pause and breathless hush.

"Eric Williams and Charles Wildney, stand forward."

The boys obeyed. From his place in the fifth, where he was sitting with
his head propped on his hand, Eric rose and advanced; and Wildney, from
the other end of the room, where the younger boys sat, getting up, came
and stood by his side.

Both of them fixed their eyes on the ground, whence they never once
raised them; and in the deadly pallor of their haggard faces you could
scarcely have recognised the joyous high-spirited friends, whose laugh
and shout had often rung so merrily through the playground, and woke the
echoes of the rocks along the shore. Every eye was on them, and they
were conscious of it, though they could not see it--painfully conscious
of it, so that they wished the very ground to yawn beneath their feet
for the moment and swallow up their shame. Companionship in disgrace
increased the suffering; had either of them been alone, he would have
been less acutely sensible to the trying nature of his position; but
that they, so different in their ages and position in the school, should
thus have their friendship and the results of it blazoned, or rather
branded, before their friends and enemies, added keenly to the misery
they felt. So with eyes bent on the floor, Eric and Charlie awaited
their sentence.

"Williams and Wildney," said Dr Rowlands in a solemn voice, of which
every articulation thrilled to the heart of every hearer, "you have been
detected in a sin most disgraceful and most dangerous. On Saturday
night you were both drinking, and you were guilty of such gross excess,
that you were neither of you in a fit state to appear among your
companions--least of all to appear among them at the hour of prayer. I
shall not waste many words on an occasion like this; only I trust that
those of your school-fellows who saw you staggering and rolling into the
room on Saturday evening in a manner so unspeakably shameful and
degrading, will learn from that melancholy sight the lesson which the
Spartans taught their children by exhibiting a drunkard before them--the
lesson of the brutalising and fearful character of this most ruinous
vice. Eric Williams and Charles Wildney, your punishment will be public
expulsion, for which you will prepare this very evening. I am unwilling
that for a single day, either of you--especially the elder of you--
should linger, so as p