We sent Browne off to him, but Carlo wasn’t to be found. He’d been seen yelling somewhere, but couldn’t be traced. What had happened was this: Tomlin, in obedience to Steggles, had kept rather close after prayers; in fact, he had spent the half-hour to bed-time in a cupboard in the gymnasium, under the rubber shoes. So Browne, not finding him, had told the first boy he saw to do so; and that boy happened to be Steggles, who had been at his heels ever since he went to the Doctor. Steggles is a miserable, unwholesome thing, but his strategy certainly comes off. Once having the message, all was easy, because Steggles merely found Carlo, and told him the Doctor wanted him. The result was much better than even Steggles hoped; because, though the Doctor generally fell on a chap who came to be flogged straightaway, like he did on Carlo, it wasn’t often anybody got such a frightful strong dose as Carlo had. Afterwards, when taxed, Steggles swore, of course, that he thought he was talking to Tomlin. Seeing the likeness, this might have been perfectly true, though in their secret hearts everybody knew Steggles too jolly well to really believe it. Carlo didn’t turn up, and after an hour or more of frantic rushing about, somebody said perhaps he’d jumped down the garden well owing to the indignity of what he’d got. But soon afterwards, in reply to a special telegram sent for the Doctor by the people at the railway station, an answer came from Golightly Towers, twenty miles off, where the purple-veined lord, father of Carlo, hung out. The kid, it seemed, had sloped down to Merivale railway station after his licking, and taken a ticket right away for Golightly, and gone home by the last train but one that night. He never returned either, but next day his father dropped in on Doctor Dunston, and Fowle managed to hear a little of what went on through the key-hole. He said that as far as he could make out the lord didn’t think much of the matter, and said one thrashing more or less wouldn’t mar Carlo. But the lord’s wife, who didn’t come, evidently took the same view as Carlo, for he never returned to Dunston’s again. The Doctor’s howler ended in his losing the little bounder altogether, which, with his views about lords in general, and especially earls, must have been frightfully rough on him. As to Tomlin, actually the Doctor never flogged him after all! I think his spirit had got a bit broken, and though Tomlin went at the end of the term, he wasn’t expelled, but withdrawn by mutual consent, like you hear of things in Parliament sometimes. He wouldn’t have gone at all, but he refused to say who was under the medlar-tree with him, and stuck to it; and Steggles absolutely declined to give himself up, because, as he truly said, he had more than kept his promise to Tomlin about helping him out of the mess.