"Which is yours?
Perhaps it's under the table too." "Hold your nonsense," cried Ferrers, angrily.

"It's very shabby of you to hinder me in this manner." Louis quietly slipped an inkstand near him, an action of which Ferrers was quite aware, and though he pretended not to notice it, he availed himself presently of the convenience.

A racking headache, however, almost disabled him from thinking, and though he was really unwell, there was only the boy he had so cruelly injured who felt any sympathy for his suffering.
Louis carefully avoided any direct manifestation of his anxiety to return good for evil, for he felt, though he hardly knew why, that his actions would be misconstrued, but whenever any little opportunity occurred in which he could really render any service, he was always as ready to do it for Ferrers as for another; and now, when from his classmates Ferrers met with nothing but jokes on his "beautiful temper," and "placid state of mind," he could not help feeling the gentleness of Louis' conduct, the absence of pleasure in his annoyance, and the look of evident sympathy he met whenever he accidentally turned his eyes in his direction.

For a few days after this he was obliged to keep his bed, and during this time, though Louis only once saw him, he thought of every little kind attention he could, that might be grateful to the invalid.
Knowing that he was not a favorite, and that few in the school would trouble themselves about him, he borrowed books and sent them to him for his amusement, and empowered the old cake man to procure some grapes, which he sent up to him by a servant, with strict orders to say nothing of where they came from.

The servant met Hamilton at the door of the room, and he relieved her of her charge, and as she did not consider herself under promise of secrecy towards him, she mentioned it, desiring him at the same time to say nothing to Ferrers.
Louis had now established a regular time for doing his own lessons, and kept to it with great perseverance to the end of the half-year, with one exception, when he had been acting prisoner in a trial performed in the school-room, by half his own class and the third, and let the evening slip by without remembering how late it grew.
His class-fellows were in the same predicament as himself, and as they had barely time to write a necessary exercise, they agreed among themselves to learn each his own piece of the lesson they had to repeat.
Louis did not seriously consider the deceit they were practising, and adopted the same plan.