“You must. I want you to grow strong. I shall give you some tonic stuff my father prescribes for people.”
I looked at him in horror, but he was glaring at the last piece of pudding on his fork.
“Just you wait!” he said gloomily.
“I will not help him in anything I think wrong,” I said to myself; and a few minutes after, Mercer leaned towards me.
“Look!” he whispered; “there’s Eely Burr and Fathead grinning at us. Wait a bit! They don’t know what a horrible revenge we’re going to have on them.”
“But if it’s we,” I said, “you ought to tell me what the revenge is going to be.”
“I’ll tell you some time,” he whispered. “Perhaps to-morrow, perhaps to-night.—You wait!”
“Oh, how I do hate being treated like that!” I thought to myself, and I was about to beg of him to tell me then, and to try to persuade him not to, do anything foolish, when the Doctor tapped the table with the handle of his cheese-knife, grace was said, and we all adjourned to the play-field for the half-hour at our disposal before we resumed our studies.
I had no further opportunity for speaking to Mercer that afternoon, for, when we returned to the schoolroom, the Doctor made us a speech, in which he said he, “regretted deeply to find.”—Here he stopped to blow his nose, and I turned hot, cold, and then wet, as I felt that we two would be publicly reproved and perhaps punished for fighting.
“That,” continued the Doctor, “many of the boys had been going back in minor subjects.”