"That's my business. Look here; I was more generous than some of you have been. All along, I felt as _sure_ who it was, cribbing those things at school, as though I had seen it done; but I never told. I just whispered to the fellow, when we were parting: 'Don't you go in for the same game next half, or I shall have you dropped upon;' and I don't think he will." "Who--which was it?" I cried, eagerly. "No: give him a chance. It was neither you nor me, and that's enough to know." Hoisting the box up on to the projecting edge of a tree, he got it on his shoulders again. Certain of his innocence then, I was in an agony to get him back. "It's of no use, Johnny. Good-bye." "Sanker! Ned! The Squire will be fit to smother us all, when he finds you are off; Mrs. Todhetley is in dreadful grief. Such an unpleasant thing has never before happened with us." "Good-bye," was all he repeated, marching resolutely off, with the black box held safe by the cord. Fit to smother us? I thought the pater would have done it, when he came home late in the afternoon; laying the blame of Sanker's going, first on Mrs. Todhetley, then on Tod, then on me. "What is to be done?" he asked, looking at us all helplessly. "I wouldn't have had it come out for the world. Think of his parents--of his own prospects." "He never did it, sir," I said, speaking up; "he swore it to me." The pater gave a sniff. "Swearing does not go for much in such cases, I'm afraid, Johnny." It was so hopeless, the making them understand Sanker's solemn truth as he did swear it, that I held my tongue. I told Tod; also, what he had said about the fellow he suspected at school; but Tod only curled his lip, and quietly reminded me that I should never be anything but a muff. Three or four days passed on. We could not learn where Sanker went to, or what had become of him; nothing about him except the fact that he had left his box at Goody Picker's cottage, asking her to take charge of it until it was sent for. Mrs. Todhetley would not write to Wales, or to the school, for fear of making mischief. I know this: it was altogether a disagreeable remembrance, whichever way we looked at it, but I was the only one who believed in his innocence.