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“That, Smither, is out of the question,” said the head master, so steadily and incisively that I gave it up, and left the room without another word. The fellows were trooping down the passage to breakfast, little guessing the secret of my miserable looks, or the reason why Browne was not in his usual place.

But the secret came out, and the school staggered under the shock. Mr Draven announced our comrade’s departure kindly enough in the afternoon, adding that he had confessed the offence for which he was expelled, and was penitent. Two hours later we saw his cab drive off, and as we watched it disappear it all seemed to us like a hideous dream.

We said little about it to one another. We did not even care to inquire particularly into the offence for which he had suffered. But we moped and missed him at every turn, and wished the miserable term were ending instead of beginning.

This, however, is a long digression. I sat down to write the story of my own trouble, not Browne’s. But the reader will understand now why I said that, as it was, apart from my own misfortunes, the term, which had still a month more to run when my story begins, had been a dismal one.

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I was wandering about the playground one frosty November morning, beginning to hope that if a frost should come we might after all get a little fun at Draven’s before the holidays came, when Odger junior, whistling shrilly, crossed my path.

Odger junior was not exactly my fag, for we had no fags at Draven’s, and if we had had, I had not yet reached that pitch of dignity at which one fellow has the right to demand the services of another. Still Odger junior had, for a consideration, done a good many odd jobs for me, and I had got into the way of regarding him as a quasi-fag.

“Hullo, youngster!” said I, as we met, “there’s going to be a stunning frost. Can’t you smell it in the air? I wish you’d cut down to Bangle’s and get me a pair of straps for my skates.”

To my astonishment, not wholly unmixed with amusement, Odger junior regarded me majestically for a moment, and then, ejaculating the oracular phrase, “Oh, ah!” walked off, his four-foot-one drawn to its full height, his hands behind his back, and his mouth still drawn up for whistling, but apparently too overcome with dignity to emit the music which an observer would naturally be led to expect.

I was not on the whole a short-tempered youth. My laziness saved me from that. It certainly did occur to me on this bright frosty morning that it would be exhilarating both for young Odger and me if I were to go after him and kick him. But what was the use? He would enjoy it as much as I should. There would be plenty of ways in which to pay him out less fatiguing than an undignified chase round the playground. So I let him go, and grinned to think how much nicer monkeys are when they behave like monkeys, and not like men.

I had a lot of work to do in my study that morning before afternoon school, and so had very little time to think of Odger junior, or any one else. As it was, I was only just in time to take my usual place in the Greek class when Mr Draven sailed into the room and the lesson began.

I had been so flurried by my hasty arrival that I did not at first observe that the desk on my right, usually occupied by a boy called Potter, was vacant.

“Where’s Potter?” I asked of my neighbour on the left. “Is he–why, there he is at Browne’s old desk!” I added, catching sight of the deserter across the room.