He does not say a word about Clive's scrape of the day before, and that awful row in the bedrooms, where the lad and three others were discovered making a supper off a pork-pie and two bottles of prime old port from the Red Cow public-house in Grey Friars Lane.

When the bell has done ringing, and all these busy little bees have swarmed into their hive, there is a solitude in the place.

The Colonel and his son walked the playground together, that gravelly flat, as destitute of herbage as the Arabian desert, but, nevertheless, in the language of the place called the green.

They walk the green, and they pace the cloisters, and Clive shows his father his own name of Thomas Newcome carved upon one of the arches forty years ago.

As they talk, the boy gives sidelong glances at his new friend, and wonders at the Colonel's loose trousers, long mustachios, and yellow face.