“Thanks. You can go now. You must come another day and bring your friends. Good-bye,” and he shook hands.
“I wonder if the chap’s all there,” said Wally to himself as he limped over to his quarters. “He forgot to jaw me. Wonder if I ought to have reminded him? Wonder who he gets his cake from? I wouldn’t care for many more impots like that. It was pretty civil of him asking me to tea, when you come to think of it. Not sure I sha’n’t back him up a bit this half, and make the chaps do so too. Wonder if he meant all four of us to come to tea? One cake wouldn’t go round. Besides, there’s no saying how that young cad Fisher minor would behave.”
This little episode was not without its effect on all the occupants of Wally’s study. For that young gentleman had not the slightest intention of turning over a new leaf by himself. No, bother it; if he was going to “back up” Stratton, the other fellows would have to back up too.
His one grief was that the stock of impositions stored up by the industry of the two new boys would not be likely to be wanted now, which would be wicked waste. D’Arcy had already occasionally drawn on them, and one day nearly spoiled the whole arrangement by taking up to Mr Wakefield fifty lines of Virgil precisely five minutes after they had been awarded. Fortunately, however, his hands were exceedingly grimy at the time, so that Mr Wakefield sent him back for ablutions before he would communicate with him. And in the interval he fortunately discovered his error, and instead of taking up the imposition with his clean hands, he delighted the master with a knotty inquiry as to one of the active tenses of the Latin verb “To be.”
However, there was no saying when the impositions might not come in useful, and meanwhile Ashby and Fisher minor were taken off the job and ordered to sit up hard with their work for Stratton.
“You know,” said Wally, propounding his scheme of moral reform in a little preliminary speech, “you kids are not sent up here to waste your time. No more’s D’Arcy.”
“How do you know what I was sent up here for?” said D’Arcy. “It wasn’t to hear your jaw.”
“Shut up. I’ve just been having tea with Stratton, and we were talking about you chaps, him and I—I mean he and me.”
“You didn’t get on to English grammar, did you, while you were about it?” asked Ashby.
“No. Look here, you chaps, no larks. It would be rather a spree if we put our back into it this term, wouldn’t it?—beastly sell, you know, for the others; and rather civil to Stratton too, for asking us to tea.”