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The coach reached London at the dreary hour of five; and he hastened to the inn at Covent Garden, where the ever-wakeful porter admitted him, and showed him to a bed. Pen looked hard at the man, and wondered whether Boots knew he was plucked? When in bed he could not sleep there. He tossed about restlessly until the appearance of daylight, when he sprang up desperately, and walked off to his uncle’s lodgings in Bury Street.

“Good ‘evens! Mr. Arthur, what ‘as ‘appened, sir?” asked the valet, who was just carrying in his wig to the Major.

“I want to see my uncle,” Pen cried in a ghastly voice, and flung himself down on a chair.

The valet backed before the pale and desperate-looking young man, with terrified and wondering glances, and disappeared into his master’s apartment, whence the Major put out his head as soon as he had his wig on.

“What? Examination over? Senior Wrangler, Double First Class, hey?” said the old gentleman. “I’ll come directly,” and the head disappeared.

Pen was standing with his back to the window, so that his uncle could not see the expression of gloomy despair on the young man’s face. But when he held out his hand to Pen, and was about to address him in his cheery, high-toned voice, he caught sight of the boy’s face; and dropping his hand said, “Why, Pen, what’s the matter?”

“You’ll see it in the papers at breakfast, sir,” Pen said.

“See what?”

“My name isn’t there, sir.”

“Hang it, why should it be?” asked the Major, more perplexed.

“I have lost everything, sir,” groaned out Pen; “my honour’s gone; I’m ruined irretrievably; I can’t go back to Oxbridge.”

“Lost your honour?” screamed out the Major. “Heaven alive! You don’t mean to say you have shown the white feather?”

Pen laughed bitterly at the word feather, and repeated it. “No, it isn’t that, sir. I’m not afraid of being shot; I wish anybody would shoot me. I have not got my degree. I–I’m plucked, sir.”

The Major had heard of plucking, but in a very vague and cursory way, and concluded that it was some ceremony performed corporally upon rebellious university youth. “I wonder you can look me in the face after such a disgrace, sir,” he said; “I wonder you submitted to it as a gentleman.”

“I couldn’t help it, sir. I did my classical papers well enough: it was those infernal mathematics, which I have always neglected.”

“Was it–was it done in public, sir?” the Major said.

“What?”

“The–the plucking?” asked the guardian, looking Pen anxiously in the face.

Pen perceived the error under which his guardian was labouring, and in the midst of his misery the blunder caused the poor wretch a faint smile, and served to bring down the conversation from the tragedy-key in which Pen had been disposed to carry it on. He explained to his uncle that he had gone in to pass his examination, and failed. On which the Major said, that though he had expected far better things of his nephew, there was no great misfortune in this, and no dishonour as far as he saw, and that Pen must try again.

“Me again at Oxbridge!” Pen thought, “after such a humiliation as that?” He felt that, except he went down to burn the place, he could not enter it.

But it was when he came to tell his uncle of his debts that the other felt surprise and anger most keenly, and broke out into speeches most severe upon Pen, which the lad bore, as best he might, without flinching.

It appeared that his bills in all amounted to about L700; and furthermore it was calculated that he had had more than twice that sum during his stay at Oxbridge. This sum he had spent, and for it he had to show–what?

“You need not press a man who is down, sir,” Pen said to his uncle, gloomily. “I know very well how wicked and idle I have been. My mother won’t like to see me dishonoured, sir,” he continued, with his voice failing; “and I know she will pay these accounts. But I shall ask her for no more money.”