The bell rings for second school, and Mr. Popkinson, arrayed in cap and gown, comes in to shake Colonel Newcome by the hand, and to say he supposes it’s to be a holiday for Newcome that day. He does not say a word about Clive’s scrape of the day before, and that awful row in the bedrooms, where the lad and three others were discovered making a supper off a pork-pie and two bottles of prime old port from the Red Cow public-house in Grey Friars Lane. When the bell has done ringing, and all these busy little bees have swarmed into their hive, there is a solitude in the place. The Colonel and his son walked the playground together, that gravelly flat, as destitute of herbage as the Arabian desert, but, nevertheless, in the language of the place called the green. They walk the green, and they pace the cloisters, and Clive shows his father his own name of Thomas Newcome carved upon one of the arches forty years ago. As they talk, the boy gives sidelong glances at his new friend, and wonders at the Colonel’s loose trousers, long mustachios, and yellow face. He looks very odd, Clive thinks, very odd and very kind, and he looks like a gentleman, every inch of him:—not like Martin’s father, who came to see his son lately in high-lows, and a shocking bad hat, and actually flung coppers amongst the boys for a scramble. He bursts out a-laughing at the exquisitely ludicrous idea of a gentleman of his fashion scrambling for coppers. And now, enjoining the boy to be ready against his return (and you may be sure Mr. Clive was on the look-out long before his sire appeared), the Colonel whirled away in his cab to the City to shake hands with his brothers, whom he had not seen since they were demure little men in blue jackets, under charge of a serious tutor.