This idea gave him such an alarm that it served to change the current of his thoughts, and before he knew it he had fallen asleep over a half-formed resolution to undertake a different sort of gymnasium exercise for a few days. Tom's first visit the next morning after chapel was, as the rules required in such cases, to Proctor Zane. "Well?" inquired that functionary in no pleasant voice as Tom stood before him, for there had been some skylarking in the college the previous night and the proctor had been unable to catch the offenders. "What is it now, Parsons?" He spoke as though Tom was an habitual offender when, as a matter of fact, though the lad had taken his part in pranks, it was only the second time he had been "on the grill," as the process was termed. "I got in after hours last night, sir," reported Tom quietly, though he resented the man's manner. "Ha! So I was informed by the watchman." He looked at Tom antagonistically. "Well," he snapped, "why don't you continue? There's more, isn't there?" "Not that I know of," replied Tom calmly. "I had permission to go to town, but I got in late, that's all." "Oh, is it? What about the student who was with you? Wasn't there some one with you?" "Yes, sir." "And didn't he engage in a fight with the watchman, and, taking advantage of a mean trick, sneak to his room? Didn't he, I ask you?" "I presume the watchman has correctly informed you of what happened." Tom's voice was coldly indifferent now, and the proctor recognized that fact. "He did," he snapped. "And you know of it, too. I expected you to tell me that." "Since when has it been a college rule," asked Tom, "to confess to the doings of another student? I thought that all that was required of me was to report my own infraction of the rules." Tom knew that he was right and that the proctor had no authority to ask him concerning the doings of Langridge, and the proctor knew that he himself was in the wrong, which knowledge, shared as it was by a student, did not add to his good temper. "Then you refuse to say who was with you?" he snapped, his eyes fixed on Tom's face. "I certainly refuse to inform on a fellow student, Mr. Zane," was Tom's answer, "and I don't think you have any right to ask me to do so." If he had stopped with his first half of the reply all might have been well, for certainly the proctor did not expect Tom or any other student to be a tale-bearer, though he always asked them to speak in order to make more easy his own task. But to be practically defied, and by a freshman, was too much for the official, who had a certain dignity of which he was proud. "Ha!" he exclaimed, "you are impertinent, Parsons." "I didn't so intend, sir." "Ha! I don't have to be informed of my rights by you. I know them. You will write me out two hundred lines of Virgil by to-morrow afternoon and you will stand suspended for two weeks, with absolutely no privileges regarding athletics or going away from college!"