A waggonette appeared at the end of the drive, and began to approach them. "Ah, there's the trap; I'll tell Mr Ashford--" Mr Ashford appeared just as the vehicle reached the door. "Well, boys, ready for the road? Good bye, and good luck. Don't forget whose son Edward the Fifth was, Coote. Keep your heads and you'll get on all right. I trust you not to get into mischief on the way. All right, Tom." During this short harangue the three boys hoisted themselves, one by one, into the waggonette, and bade a subdued farewell to their preceptor, who stood on the doorstep, waving to them cheerily, until they turned a corner and found themselves actually on the road to Templeton. Not to keep the reader further in suspense as to the purpose of this important expedition, our three young gentlemen, having severally attained the responsible age of fourteen summers, and having severally absorbed into their systems as much of the scholastic pabulum of Mountjoy House as that preparatory institution was in the habit of dispensing to boys destined for a higher sphere, were this morning on their way, in awe and trembling, to the examination hall of Templeton school, there to submit themselves to an ordeal which would decide whether or not they were worthy to emerge from their probationary state and take their rank among the public schoolboys of the land. Such being the case, it is little wonder they looked fidgety as they caught their last glimpse of Mr Ashford, and realised that before they came in sight of Mountjoy again a crisis in the lives of each of them would have come and gone. "Whose son was he?" said Coote, appealingly, in about five minutes. His voice sounded quite startling, after the long, solemn silence which had gone before. His two companions stared at him, afterwards at one another; then one of them said-- "I forget." "Whose son was he?" said Coote, turning with an air of desperation to the other. "Richard the Third's," said the latter. Coote mused, and inwardly repeated a string of names. "Doesn't sound right," said he. "Are you sure, Dick?" "Who else could it be?" said the young gentleman addressed as Dick, whose real name was Richardson. "Hanged if I know," said the unhappy Coote, proceeding to write an R and a 3 on his thumb-nail with a pencil. "It doesn't look right I believe because your own name's Richardson, you think everybody else is Richard's son too." And the perpetrator of this very mild joke bent his head over his learned thumb-nail, and frowned. It was a point of honour at Mountjoy always to punish a joke summarily, whether good, bad, or indifferent. For a short time, consequently, the paternity of Edward the Fifth was lost sight of, as was also Coote himself, in the performance of the duty which devolved on Richardson and his companion.