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On the first morning after reassembling, Mr Jellicott, the master in charge of Saint Dominic's, summoned the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth to meet him in the lecture-theatre, and there announced to them the reason of the head master's absence.
Directly class was over, Stephen had to go and wait upon Loman for a particular purpose, which the reader must hear of in due time. Loman was a comparatively new boy at Saint Dominic's. He had entered eighteen months ago, in the Fifth Form, having come direct from another school. He was what many persons would call an agreeable boy, although for some reason or other he was never very popular.
The meeting in the Fifth, however, was to consider a far more important subject than the rebellious clubs of the Junior School. The reader will doubtless have inferred, from what has already been said, that the young gentlemen of the Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's entertained, among other emotions, a sentiment something like jealousy of their seniors and superiors in the sixth.
The boy who, if not liked, had yet passed among most of his schoolfellows as a steady, well-conducted fellow, now suddenly shown up before the whole school like this! Loman went his way to his study, feeling that the mask was pretty nearly off his face at last, and that Saint Dominic's knew him almost as he really was. Yet did they know all?
Stephen wondered the roof of Saint Dominic's did not fall in upon these shameless marauders, and was just contemplating putting the stores all back again into the cupboard to prevent further piracy, when the welcome sound of Oliver's voice in the passage put an end to further suspense. "Well, here you are," said Oliver, entering with a friend. "Wray, this is my young brother, just turned up."
The captain is an object of special awe among the youngsters of the Fourth Junior, who positively quake in their shoes whenever his manly form appears in the upper corridor. These youngsters, by the way, are still the liveliest section of Saint Dominic's.
Ricketts stopped to talk to several of them, and was very nearly going off with one of the party, when he suddenly remembered his charge. It was rather humiliating this, for Stephen; and already his triumphal entry into Saint Dominic's was beginning to be shorn of some of its glory. No one noticed him; and the only one that paid him the least attention appeared to look upon him as a nuisance.
Every moment he expected the fatal vision of Cripps at Saint Dominic's, and with it his own certain disgrace and ruin, and, as time went on, his perturbation became so great that he really felt ill with it. But Cripps did not come that day or the next. The next day was one of mighty excitement in Saint Dominic's. The result of the examination for the Waterston Exhibition was announced.
He had come to Saint Dominic's with a great quantity of good resolutions, the chief of which was that he would work hard and keep out of mischief, and it grieved him much to find that in neither aim was he succeeding. The first evening or two he had worked very diligently at preparation. He had taken pains with his fractions, and looked out every word in his Caesar.
With one or two, however, the holiday dragged heavily, and one of these was Master Thomas Senior. This forlorn youth, no longer now rollicking Tom of the Fifth, but the meek and mild, and withal sulky, hopeful of the Reverend Thomas Senior, D.D., of Saint Dominic's, watched the last of his chums go off with anything but glee.
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