ped to Geoff's little mind, with its
little bit of painful experience. "I say, Theo!" the boy cried; and
then stared and said no more.

"Well! what is it you say? I hope you are prepared to-day, not like last
time."

"Last time! but I was very well prepared! It is you who forget. I knew
all my lessons."

"You had better teach me, then, Geoff, for I don't know all: no, nor
half what I want to know. Oh, is this your exercise?" Warrender said,
sitting down. He looked it over and corrected it with his pencil,
hanging over it, seeming to forget the boy's presence. When that was
done he opened the book carelessly, anywhere, not at the place, as
Geoff, who watched with keen eyes everything the young man was doing,
perceived instantly. "Where did you leave off last time? Go on," he
said. Geoff began; but he was far too intent on watching Theo to know
what he was doing; and as he construed with his eyes only, and not all
of them, for he had to keep his companion's movements in sight all the
time, it is needless to say that Geoff made sad work of his Caesar. And
his little faculties were more and more sharpened with alarm, and more
and more blunted in Latin, when he found that, stumble as he liked, Theo
did not correct him nor say a word. He sat with his head propped on his
hands, and when Geoff paused said, "Go on." Either this meant something
very awful in the shape of fault-finding when the culprit had come to
the end of the lesson, the exemption now meaning dire retribution then,
or else--there was something very wrong with Theo. Geoff's little sharp
eyes seemed to leap out of their sockets with excitement and suspense.

At last Warrender suddenly, in the midst of a dreadfully boggled sentence,
after Geoff had beaten himself on every side of these walls of words in
bewildering endeavours to find a nominative, suddenly sprang up to his
feet. "Look here," he said, "I think I'll give you a holiday to-day."

Geoff, much startled, closed his book upon his hand. "I had a holiday
yesterday."

"Oh yes, to be sure! what has that to do with it? You can put away your
books for to-day. As for being prepared, my boy, if my head had not been
so bad----"

"Is your head bad, Theo?" Geoff put on a hypo-critical look of solicitude
to divert attention from his own delinquencies.

"I think it will split in two," said Warrender, pressing his hands upon
his temples, in which indeed the blood was so swelling in every vein
that they seemed