? What have they been
doing?"

"They said they would spiflicate me if I told!" sighed Tom.

"They shall never do anything to you;" and, by-and-by, a sobbing
confession was drawn forth, muttered at intervals, as low as if Tom
expected the strings of onions to hear and betray him to his foes.
Looking on him as a deserter, these town-boys had taken advantage of his
brother's absence to heap on him every misery they could inflict. There
had been a wager between Edward Anderson and Sam Axworthy as to what
Tom could be made to do, and his personal timidity made him a miserable
victim, not merely beaten and bruised, but forced to transgress every
rule of right and wrong that had been enforced on his conscience.
On Sunday, they had profited by the absence of their dux to have a
jollification at a little public-house, not far from the playing-fields;
and here had Tom been dragged in, forced to partake with them, and
frightened with threats that he had treated them all, and was liable
to pay the whole bill, which, of course, he firmly believed, as well
as that he should be at least half murdered if he gave his father any
suspicion that the whole had not been consumed by himself. Now, though
poor Tom's conscience had lost many scruples during the last spring,
the offence, into which he had been forced, was too heinous to a child
brought up as he had been to be palliated even in his own eyes. The
profanation of Sunday, and the carousal in a public-house, had combined
to fill him with a sense of shame and degradation, which was the real
cause that he felt himself unworthy to come and read with his sisters.
His grief and misery were extreme, and Norman's indignation was such
as could find no utterance. He sat silent, quivering with anger, and
clenching his fingers over the handle of the hoe.

"I knew it!" sighed Tom. "None of you will ever speak to me again!"

"You! Why, August, man, I have better hopes of you than ever. You are
more really sorry now than ever you were before."

"I had never been at the Green Man before," said poor Tom, feeling his
future life stained.

"You never will again!"

"When you are gone--" and the poor victim's voice died away.

"Tom, you will not stay after me. It is settled that when I go to
Balliol, you leave Stoneborough, and go to Mr. Wilmot as pupil. Those
scamps shall never have you in their clutches again."

It did not produce the ecstasy Norman had expected. The boy still sat
on the grou