“Take the consequences, that’s all,” answered Walter.
“Hadn’t you better go and tell Paton about it at once instead of letting him find it out?”
“No,” said Walter; “he’s done nothing but bully me, and I don’t care.”
“Then let me go,” said his friend earnestly. “I know Paton well; I’m sure he’d be ready to forgive you, if I explained it all to him.”
“You’re very good, Flip; but don’t go:—it’s too late.”
“Well, Walter, you mustn’t think that I had no share in this because of being afraid. I was one of the group, and I’ll share the punishment with you, whatever it is. I hope for your sake it won’t be found out.”
But if Henderson had seen a little deeper he would have hoped that it would be found out, for there is nothing that works quicker ruin to any character than undiscovered sin. It was happy for Walter that his wrong impulses did not remain undiscovered; happy for him that they came so rapidly to be known and to be punished.
It was noised through the school in five minutes that Evson, one of the new fellows, had smashed open Paton’s desk and burned the contents. “What an awful row he’ll get into!” was the general comment. Walter heard Kenrick inquiring eagerly about it as they sat at tea; but Kenrick didn’t ask him about it, though they sat so near each other. After the foolish, proud manner of sensitive boys, Walter and Kenrick, though each liked the other none the less, were not on speaking terms. Walter, less morbidly proud than Kenrick, would not have suffered this silly alienation to continue had not his attention been occupied by other troubles. Neither of them, therefore, liked to be the first to break the ice, and now in his most serious difficulty Walter had lost the advice and sympathy of his most intimate friend.
The fellows seemed to think that he must inevitably be expelled for this fracas. The poor boy’s thoughts were very, very bitter as he laid his head that night on his restless pillow, remembered what an ungovernable fool he had been, and dreamt of his happy and dear-loved home. How strangely he seemed to have left his old, innocent life behind him, and how little he would have believed it possible, two months ago, that he could by any conduct of his own have so soon incurred, or nearly incurred, the penalty of expulsion from Saint Winifred’s School.
He had certainly yielded very quickly to passion, and he felt that in consequence he had made his position more serious than that of other boys who were in every sense of the word twice as bad as himself. But what he laid to the score of his ill-luck was in truth a very happy providence by which punishment was sent speedily and heavily upon him, and so his evil tendencies, mercifully nipped in the bud, crushed with a tender yet with an iron hand before they had expanded more blossoms and been fed by deeper roots. He might have been punished less speedily had his faults been more radical, or his wrong-doings of a deeper dye.