“Well, no doubt you did what seemed right, and Hatchard has not been quite straight; but I now understand what I saw two hours ago, and what gave me a shock. You favoured him with your mind about eleven, I should guess? Yes: then at twelve he came out of a restaurant in Dale Street as if he had been drinking. That is the first time Hatchard ever did that kind of thing, I believe, but it will not be the last: his face was quite changed--half woe-begone and half desperate.” “If Thomas takes to tasting”--Macfarlane was much moved--“it's all over with him: he's such a soft-hearted chap.” “Nonsense, you're making too much of it; but I was a trifle sharp, perhaps: he's been very provoking, and any other man would have said the same except you two fellows, and the one of you is so charitable that he would find an excuse for a pickpocket, and the other is so cannie that he can't make up his mind to say anything.” After which there was a pause. “Yes,” began Oxley again, falling into ancient history, “he has gone off form a bit--the best may do so at a time--but Tommy wasn't half a bad fellow once: he got a study at Soundbergh before me, and he was very decent with it, letting me do 'prep.' in it before exams.; and I never counted him sidey, did you, B.?” “I should think not; I'll say that for him at any rate, there wasn't one scrap of humbug in Tommy: why, he was a prefect when I was in the fourth, and he didn't mind although a chap 'ragged' and chaffed him; he was the jolliest 'pre.' in the whole school. It was perhaps rather hard lines to slang him to-day,--I half wish I hadn't.” “If Tommy got a grub-box from home every chap in Buttery's house knew,”--Oxley was bent on reminiscences,--“it was shared round in three days, and his raspberry jam was not to be despised. I hear him yet: 'All right, Ox., dig in, there's lots left' Now there's By les, who makes speeches about hospitals: he was mean if you please.” “Mean ain't the word for Byles,” and in his enthusiasm Freddie Beazley dropped into school slang, which no public-schoolboy ever forgets, and which lasts from generation to generation, like the speech of the Gypsies: “Byles was a beastly gut, and a sneak too; why, for all his cheek now he isn't fit to black Tommy's shoes. Tommy wasn't what you would call 'pie,' but he was as straight as a die. I'd give ten pounds not to have called him that word to-day.” Freddie was breaking down. “Poor old Tommy!” went on Oxley: “one never expected him to come such a cropper; he was a good all-round man--cricket, football, sports, Tommy did well for his house; he was a double-colour man.” “Do ye mind the ten miles, lads?” and Macfarlane chuckled. “Rather,” and Freddie could not sit still: “he did it in one hour twelve minutes and was it fifteen seconds?” “Thirteen and three-fifths seconds.” Macfarlane spoke with decision. “And he could have walked back to Buttery's, as if he had never run a yard; but didn't the fellows carry him?”