For a full minute there was a dead silence. It was so entirely unusual a thing for the dean to shake hands familiarly with a college boy, that those gentry did not at first decide how to take it. Then one of them, more impudent than the rest, bowed his body down before the new junior with mock gravity.
"If you please, sir, wouldn't you be pleased to make yourself cock of the school after this, and cut out St. John?"
"Take care of your tongue, Marshall," admonished St. John, who made one of the throng.
"I am blowed, though!" returned Marshall. "Did anybody ever see such a go as this?"
"What's the row?" demanded Hennet, a fine youth, one of Mr. Wilberforce's private pupils, and who only now came up.
"Oh, my! you should have been here, Hennet," responded Marshall. "We have got a lord, or something else, among us. The Dean of Westerbury has been bowing down to worship him."
Hennet, not understanding, looked at St. John.
"No. Trash!" explained St. John. "Marshall is putting his tongue and his foot into it to-day. I'm off to breakfast."
The word excited anticipations of the meal, and all the rest were off to breakfast too—making the grounds echo with their shouts as they ran.