"You duffer! I didn't mean them--pudding raisins I meant, about sixpence. I say, you'd better take them back, hadn't you?" This was gratitude! "I can't now," said Stephen. "I've got to get somebody's tea ready--I say, where's his study?" "Whose? Loman's? Oh, it's about the eighth on the right in the third passage; next to the one with the kicks on it. What a young muff you are to get this kind of raisin! I say, you'd have plenty of time to change them." "I really wouldn't," said Stephen, hurrying off, and perhaps guessing that before he met Mr Paul again the raisins would be past changing. The boy to whom belonged the mixed sweets was no more grateful than Paul had been. "You've chosen the very ones I hate," he said, surveying the selection with a look of disgust. "You said peppermint," said Stephen. "But I didn't say green, beastly things!" grumbled the other. "Here, you can have one of them, it's sure to make you sick!" Stephen said "Thank you," and went off to deliver up the bat. "What a time you've been!" was all the thanks he got in that quarter. "Why couldn't you come straight back with it?" This was gratifying. Stephen was learning at least one lesson that afternoon--that a fag, if he ever expects to be thanked for anything he does, is greatly mistaken. He went off in a highly injured frame of mind to Loman's study. Master Paul's directions might have been more explicit--"The eighth door on the right; next to the one with the kicks." Now, as it happened, the door with the kicks on it was itself the eighth door on the right, with a study on either side of it, and which of these two was Loman's Stephen could not by the unaided light of nature determine. He peeped into Number 7; it was empty. "Perhaps he's cut his name on the door," thought Stephen. He might have done so, but as there were about fifty different letters cut on the door, he was not much wiser for that. "I'd better look and see if his name is on his collars," Stephen next reflected, remembering with what care his mother had marked his own linen. He opened a drawer; it was full of jam-pots. At that moment the door opened behind him, and the next thing Stephen was conscious of was that he was half-stunned with a terrific box on the ears. "Take that, you young thief!" said the indignant owner of the study; "I'll teach you to stick your finger in my jam. What do you mean by it?" and a cuff served as a comma between each sentence. "I really didn't--I only wanted--I was looking for--" "That'll do; don't tell lies as well as steal; get away." "I never stole anything!" began Stephen, whose confusion was being rapidly followed by indignation at this unjust suspicion. "That'll do. A little boy like you shouldn't practise cheating. Off you go! If I catch you again I'll take you to the Doctor."