“Don’t laugh at me,” cried Distin with a stamp of the foot. “Can’t you see how I’m degraded; how bitter a sting it was to see you, whom I tried to injure, come to my help. Isn’t it all a judgment on me?”
“Don’t know,” said Vane looking at him stolidly and then frowning and administering a sounding punch in the ribs to his restive seat, with the effect that there was another yell.
“You make light of it,” continued Distin, “for you cannot understand what I feel. I have, I say, to take these brutes up to the police—”
“No, no,” cried the two lads, piteously.
”—And then go straight to Syme, and confess everything, and of course he’ll expel me. Nice preparation for a college life; and what will they say at home?”
“Yes,” said Vane, echoing the other’s words; “what will they say at home? You mean over in Trinidad?”
Distin bowed his head, his nervous-looking face working from the anguish he felt, and his lower lip quivering with the mental agony and shame.
“Trinidad’s a long way off,” said Vane, thoughtfully.
“No place is far off now,” cried Distin, passionately. “And if it were ten times as far, what then? Don’t I know it? Do you think I can ever forget it all?”
“No,” said Vane; “you never will. I suppose it must have made you uncomfortable all along.”