“Oh, thank you!” cried Loman, delighted, and feeling already as if the debt was paid. “And you’ll get your friend to wait too, won’t you?”
“Can’t do that. I shall have to square up with him and look to you for the lot, and most likely drop into the workhouse for my pains.”
“Oh, no. You can be quite certain of getting the money.”
“Well, blessed if I ain’t a easy-going cove,” said Mr Cripps, with a grin. “It ain’t every one as ’ud wait three months on your poll-parrot scholarships, or whatever you call ’em. Come, business is business. Give us your promise on a piece of paper—if you must impose upon me.” Loman, only too delighted, wrote at Mr Cripps’s dictation a promise to pay the thirty pounds, together with five pounds interest, in September, and quitted the Cockchafer with as light a heart as if he had actually paid off every penny of the debt.
“Of course I’m safe to get it! Why ever didn’t I think of that before? Won’t I just work the rest of the term! Nothing like having an object when you’re grinding.”
With this philosophical reflection he re-entered Saint Dominic’s, and unobserved rejoined the spectators in the cricket-field, just in time to witness a very exciting finish to a fiercely contested encounter.