“We shall be obliged to take further measures, Mr Kennedy, if you behave in this refractory way.”
“I don’t care what measures you take. I cannot listen in silence to an accusation which I loathe—of a crime of which I am wholly innocent.”
“Why, sir, you confessed that you suspected some unfair design.”
“But not this design. Proceed, sir; I will not interrupt you again; but let me say that I am totally indifferent to any blame which you throw on me for a brutality of which the whole responsibility rests on others.”
The thread of the Dean’s oration was quite broken by Kennedy’s impetuous interruption, and he merely added—“Well, Mr Kennedy, I am sorry to see you so little penitent for the position in which you have placed yourself. You have disappointed the expectation of all your friends, and however you may brazen it out, your character has contracted a stain.”
“You can say so, sir, if you choose,” said Kennedy; and he left the room with a formal bow.
A few days after, Mr Grayson asked him to what Bruce had alluded in his insinuation about an examination-paper.
“He alludes, sir, to an event which happened some time ago.”
Further questions were useless; nevertheless Kennedy saw that his tutor’s suspicions were not only aroused, but that they had taken the true direction. Mr Grayson despised him, and in Saint Werner’s he had lost caste.
That evening Bruce vanished from Camford, with the regrets of few except his tailors and his duns. To this day he has not paid his college debts or discharged the bill for the gorgeous furniture of his rooms. But we shall hear of him again.