He remembered
how often he had got cheered there for his feats at cricket and
football, and how often he and Upton in old days, and he and Wildney
afterwards, had walked there on Sundays, arm in arm. Then the stroll to
Port Island, and Barker's plot against him, and the evening at the Stack
passed through his mind; and the dinner at the Jolly Herring, and, above
all, Vernon's death. Oh! how awful it seemed to him now, as he looked
through the darkness at the very road along which they had brought
Verny's dead body. Then his thoughts turned to the theft of the pigeons,
his own drunkenness, and then his last cruel, cruel experiences, and
this dreadful end of the day which, for an hour or two, had seemed _so_
bright on that very spot where he stood. Could it be that this (oh, how
little he had ever dreamed of it)--that this was to be the conclusion of
his school days?
Yes, in those rooms, of which the windows fronted him, there they lay,
all his schoolfellows--Montagu, and Wildney, and Duncan, and all whom he
cared for best.
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