“All right; I’ve done.”
“I say, will you come, Nic?”
“No; I’m going to see Green back to the Friary.”
“And then,” cried Tomlins, “they’re going to have a can of hot water and sponge one another, and make friends and live happy ever after. I say, wouldn’t they both look nice in a glass case!”
Nic smiled in spite of himself; and went on back to the Friary, where the man-servant also indulged in a grin as he saw the battered, pair, who partook of their tea with pain, and looked thoroughly unpresentable when at eight o’clock they were summoned to the doctor’s study to be lectured severely, Nic getting the greater part of the scolding, which ended with the ominous words:
“I will say no more, Dominic Braydon, for I don’t like to come hastily to decisions; but I am afraid that I shall be forced to expel so evil-tempered, virulent, and quarrelsome a boy. Now retire, sir, to your dormitory. I will see you after breakfast in the morning.”
Nic went slowly up to the room he shared with Tomlins and the boy who had been his second, feeling that the doctor was cruelly unjust in refusing to listen to explanations which he had on his side been extremely unwilling to make.
“Nobody seems to understand me,” he said to himself; “convict, always convict. And, suppose I am expelled, what shall I do? what will my father say? It seems sometimes more than I can bear;” and for hours that night he lay awake, feeling no bodily pains in the fiercer ones of the mind, and always dwelling upon his position—quite alone in England, with father, mother, and sisters at the other side of the world, at a time, too, when it might take a year for a letter sent to bring back its answer; so that it was getting far on toward the early dawn when he ceased thinking about the far-away land of the convict and kangaroo, and went off fast asleep.