“No, not much. I got down among their feet somehow and couldn’t get up. But if you hadn’t turned up when you did I might have got it hot.”
“It was Fairbairn pulled us both out, I think,” said Riddell, “for I was down too.”
“Yes, I hear you got an awful hack.”
“Nothing much at all.”
“I say, Riddell,” said Wyndham, nervously, after a pause, “I mean to break with Silk; I wish I’d never taken up with him. I shouldn’t have gone down to the town at all yesterday if it hadn’t been for him.”
“I think you’d be ever so much better without him,” said Riddell.
“I know I would. Do you recollect lecturing me about sticking up for myself that night last month? I’ve been uncomfortable about chumming with him ever since, but somehow he seemed to have a pull on me.”
“What sort of pull?”
“Oh,” said the boy, becoming still more uncomfortable, and afraid of breaking his promise to say nothing about Beamish’s, “a good many things of one sort or another. I’ve gone wrong, I know.”
Wyndham would have given much to be free to make a full confession of all his “going wrong” to the sympathetic Riddell, but, heartily weary as he was of Silk and Gilks, he had promised them to keep their secrets, and young Wyndham, whatever his faults, was honest.