r, so
steadily and incisively that I gave it up, and left the room without
another word. The fellows were trooping down the passage to breakfast,
little guessing the secret of my miserable looks, or the reason why
Browne was not in his usual place.

But the secret came out, and the school staggered under the shock. Mr
Draven announced our comrade's departure kindly enough in the afternoon,
adding that he had confessed the offence for which he was expelled, and
was penitent. Two hours later we saw his cab drive off, and as we
watched it disappear it all seemed to us like a hideous dream.

We said little about it to one another. We did not even care to inquire
particularly into the offence for which he had suffered. But we moped
and missed him at every turn, and wished the miserable term were ending
instead of beginning.

This, however, is a long digression. I sat down to write the story of
my own trouble, not Browne's. But the reader will understand now why I
said that, as it was, apart from my own misfortunes, the term, which had
still a month more to run when my story begins, had been a dismal one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was wandering about the playground one frosty November morning,
beginning to hope that if a frost should come we might after all get a
little fun at Draven's before the holidays came, when Odger junior,
whistling shrilly, crossed my path.

Odger junior was not exactly my fag, for we had no fags at Draven's, and
if we had had, I had not yet reached that pitch of dignity at which one
fellow has the right to demand the services of another. Still Odger
junior had, for a consideration, done a good many odd jobs for me, and I
had got into the way of regarding him as a quasi-fag.

"Hullo, youngster!" said I, as we met, "there's going to be a stunning
frost. Can't you smell it in the air? I wish you'd cut down to
Bangle's and get me a pair of straps for my skates."

To my astonishment, not wholly unmixed with amusement, Odger junior
regarded me majestically for a moment, and then, ejaculating the
oracular phrase, "Oh, ah!" walked off, his four-foot-one drawn to its
full height, his hands behind his back, and his mouth still drawn up for
whistling, but apparently too overcome with dignity to emit the music
which an observer would naturally be led to expect.

I was not on the whole a short-tempered youth. My laziness saved me
from that.