As Constable John Tinsley, Richmond division, Metropolitan Police, was on his rounds on Monday evening last, he noticed a man lurking in the garden of an empty house on the hill, and, on demanding an explanation, was savagely assaulted and left senseless in the road. There can be little doubt, from the bruises on Tinsley's body, that the ruffian felled him with some blunt instrument, and afterwards kicked him as he lay insensible. Tinsley is now on duty again, but considers he has had a lucky escape. He describes his assailant as a thick-set and powerful young fellow of the working class, and has little doubt that he was one of the brutal and impudent thieves who are at present a pest of the neighbourhood. Harry Ringrose would not have recognised himself had he not been on the look-out for some such item: when he did, he breathed more freely, though not freely enough to show himself unnecessarily on Richmond Hill. The paragraph he cut out and treasured for many years. CHAPTER XX. BIDING HIS TIME. When Scrafton's knock thundered through the house on the morning after Harry's adventure, Mrs. Bickersteth again rose hastily and bustled from the schoolroom; and for the next five minutes the ears of the junior master had some cause to tingle. When the schoolmistress returned she would not look at Harry, who was well aware that she had secretly wished him to resign, and that conscience alone forbade her to send him away in obedience to Scrafton's demands. That such demands had been made the day before, and reiterated this morning, Harry was as certain as though he had heard them; but the certainty only cemented his resolve to stay where he was, to give not the smallest pretext for his dismissal, and to watch Scrafton, patiently, steadily, day after day, for some explanation of his animus against himself and of his mysterious relations with Gordon Lowndes. It chanced that the middle of that September was as warm as midsummer, and on the first Wednesday of the term a whisper of cricket went round the school. It appeared that on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, throughout the summer, the boys played cricket in Bushey Park, and as it was still summer weather they were to do so this afternoon. "Are you going to take us, sir?" asked Gifford, as they were changing into flannels, under Harry's supervision, in their dormitory, after dinner. "Not that I know of," said Harry. "Who generally does?" "Mr. Scrafton, and he doesn't know the rules----" "Read 'em through once, years ago----" "And thinks he understands the game----" "And scores and umpires----" "And gives two men out at once!"