Charley Channing--a truthful, good boy, full of integrity, kind and loving by nature, and a universal favourite--sat tilted on the books. He was wishing with all his heart that he had not seen something which he had seen that day. He had been going through the cloisters in the afternoon, about the time that all Helstonleigh, college boys included, were in the streets watching for the sheriff’s procession, when he saw one of the seniors steal (Bywater had been happy in the epithet) out of the cathedral into the quiet cloisters, peer about him, and then throw a broken ink-bottle into the graveyard which the cloisters enclosed. The boy stole away without perceiving Charley; and there sat Charley now, trying to persuade himself by some ingenious sophistry--which, however, he knew _was_ sophistry--that the senior might not have been the one in the mischief; that the ink-bottle might have been on legitimate duty, and that he threw it from him because it was broken. Charles Channing did not like these unpleasant secrets. There was in the school a code of honour--the boys called it so--that one should not tell of another; and if the head-master ever went the length of calling the seniors to his aid, those seniors deemed themselves compelled to declare it, if the fault became known to them. Hence Tom Channing’s hasty arrest of his brother’s words. “I wonder if I could see the ink-bottle there?” quoth Charles to himself. Rising from the books he ran through the cloisters to a certain part, and there, by a dexterous spring, perched himself on to the frame of the open mullioned windows. The gravestones lay pretty thick in the square, enclosed yard, the long, dank grass growing around them; but there appeared to be no trace of an ink-bottle. “What on earth are you mounted up there for? Come down instantly. You know the row there has been about the walls getting defaced.” The speaker was Gerald Yorke, who had come up silently. Openly disobey him, young Channing dared not, for the seniors exacted obedience in school and out of it. “I’ll get down directly, sir. I am not hurting the wall.” “What are you looking at? What is there to see?” demanded Yorke. “Nothing particular. I was looking for what I can’t see,” pointedly returned Charley. “Look here, Miss Channing; I don’t quite understand you to-day. You were excessively mysterious in school, just now, over that surplice affair. Who’s to know you were not in the mess yourself?” “I think you might know it,” returned Charley, as he jumped down. “It was more likely to have been you than I.” Yorke laid hold of him, clutching his jacket with a firm grasp. “You insolent young jackanapes! Now! what do you mean? You don’t stir from here till you tell me.” “I’ll tell you, Mr. Yorke; I’d rather tell,” cried the boy, sinking his voice to a whisper. “I was here when you came peeping out of the college doors this afternoon, and I saw you come up to this niche, and fling away an ink-bottle.”