CHAPTER XI.
SHADOWS OF COMING EVENTS.
The Easter holidays came and went as rapidly as Easter holidays always do, and before the Alliance had recovered from the excitement connected with their first experience of breaking up at Ronleigh, they were back again, greeting their friends, asking new boys their names, and, in short, commencing their second term as regular old stagers.

Up to the present they had been content to "lie low," and had remained satisfied with making the acquaintance of their class-mates in "The Happy Family;" but now they began to take more interest in school matters in general, and to notice what was going on in other circles besides their own.
In answer to the eager inquiries of his two companions, Jack Vance said that he had seen nothing of Noaks during the holidays, except having passed him on one or two occasions in the street.

The notice of the fifty pounds reward still appeared in the windows of the police station; but the robbery itself was beginning to be looked upon as a thing of the past, and was already wellnigh forgotten.
"I wonder if Noaks has still got my knife ?" said Mugford.
"Oh, I don't know," answered Jack.

"He's too much taken up with Mouler and Gull and all that lot to think about us.

I shouldn't bother my head about it any further; he only showed us that paper out of spite, to put us in a funk." It was pretty evident, to the most casual observer, that the quarrel which the Black Swan incident had occasioned between Thurston and his brother prefects had not yet been dismissed from the minds of either party.