"If I only knew what? Perhaps you would better tell me and let me judge for myself," she suggested; and out of the past came a flick of the memory whip to make him feel again that she was immeasurably his senior.
"I'm expelled," he said bluntly.
"Oh!" For a full minute, as it seemed to him, she looked steadfastly out of the window at the wall of blackness flitting past, and the steady drumming of the wheels grated on his nerves and got into his blood. When it was about to become unbearable she turned and gave him her hand again. "I'm just as sorry as I can be!" she declared, and the slate-blue eyes confirmed it.
Tom hung his head, just as he had in the trying interview with Doctor Tollivar. But he told her a great deal more than he had told the principal.
"It was this way: three of the boys came to my room to play cards—because their rooms were watched. I didn't want to play—oh, I'm none too good;"—this in answer to something in her eyes that made him eager to tell her the exact truth—"I've done it lots of times. But that night I'd been thinking—well, I just didn't want to, that's all. Then they said I was afraid, and of course, that settled it."
"Of course," she agreed loyally.
"Wait; I want you to know it all," he went on doggedly. "When Martin—he's the Greek and Latin, you know—slipped up on us, there was a bottle of whisky on the table. He took down our names, and then he pointed at the bottle, and said, 'Which one of you does that belong to?' Nobody said anything, and after it began to get sort of—well, kind of monotonous, I picked up the bottle and offered him a drink, and put it in my pocket. That settled me."
"But it wasn't yours," she averred.
His smile was a rather ferocious grin. "Wasn't it? Well, I took it, anyway; and I've got it yet. Now see here: that's my berth over there and I'm going over to it. You needn't let on like you know me any more."
"Fiddle!" she said, making a face at him. "You say that like a little boy trying, oh, so hard, to be a man. I'll believe you are just as bad as bad can be, if you want me to; but you mustn't be rude to me. We don't play cards or drink things at Carroll College, but some of us have brothers, and—well, we can't help knowing."