They were not to jump by one leap into the perfect schoolboy; still, with honesty and hope left, who shall say they had lost all?
As to their immediate care, the examination--their last lingering expectation of getting their remove slowly vanished before those ruthless questions, all of which they knew they ought to know, but many of which they discovered they knew nothing about.
Other boys, like Aspinall, who, with all his tears and terrors, had struggled through the term more of a hero than either of his doughty protectors, found the time only too short to answer all they had to answer; and our two dejected ones, as they looked round, and saw the fluency of every one else, felt themselves, like sediment, gradually sinking to their level.

As long as the stir of term life had lasted, they had imagined themselves as well up, even better than most of their contemporaries; but now they began to find out it was not so.
The suspense, if they felt any, was not long.

Two days after the examination, at the time when the Sixth and Fifth were passing through their ordeal, the new boys' list came out.
Aspinall was first, and got his well-deserved remove, with a compliment from the Doctor into the bargain, which made his pale face glow with pleasure.

Dick, with a sturdy effort to look cheerful, waved his congratulations across the Hall, and then settled down to hear the almost interminable string of names before his or Georgie's broke the monotony.
In their own minds, and in the modesty of their own self-abasement, they had fixed on the twentieth place, or thereabouts, for Heathcote, and about the twenty-fifth for Dick.

Alas! the singles grew into the teens, and the teens into the twenties, and the twenties into the thirties before the break came.