"Well, I was chaffing a new boy, and the new boy happened to be Moncrief's cousin. It upset Moncrief, and I ought to have left off; but I didn't. I kept it up, and that's how it was Moncrief came to strike me."
"Well, it's very honourable of you to own up to it. If every boy in the school was as honest as you, Newall, we should soon find out who was the culprit who went to my desk. Moncrief was guilty of a Quixotic act of disobedience, as it turns out, and I think, in the circumstances he has been sufficiently punished. It is due to you that he is released."
Newall was quite the hero of the school that morning. He had done a manly thing in speaking up for Moncrief. That was the general opinion. Paul thought the same. He had scarcely expected Newall would act up to the promise that he had given him, but he had carried it out to the letter. He had, somehow, never liked him, but he couldn't be such a bad sort of fellow, after all.
"I must try to get over my prejudice against him," he thought.
So Stanley came back to his form, looking none the worse for the night he had spent in Dormitory X.
It was not, however, till he and Paul were in the grounds that they had the chance of speaking together.
"I thought Weevil meant keeping me in that wretched dormitory another day and night," Stanley said, as Paul cordially greeted him. "How did he come to let me out, I wonder?"
"Guess."
"Have you been speaking up for me?"
"No; Mr. Weevil wouldn't listen to me yesterday, and he wouldn't have listened this morning. Guess again."