Arthur laid his thin, white hand, on which the blue veins stood out so plainly, on Tom’s great brown fist, and smiled at him; and then looked out of the window again, as if he couldn’t bear to lose a moment of the sunset, into the tops of the great feathery elms, round which the rooks were circling and clanging, returning in flocks from their evening’s foraging parties.  The elms rustled, the sparrows in the ivy just outside the window chirped and fluttered about, quarrelling, and making it up again; the rooks, young and old, talked in chorus, and the merry shouts of the boys and the sweet click of the cricket-bats came up cheerily from below.

“Dear George,” said Tom, “I am so glad to be let up to see you at last.  I’ve tried hard to come so often, but they wouldn’t let me before.”

“Oh, I know, Tom; Mary has told me every day about you, and how she was obliged to make the Doctor speak to you to keep you away.  I’m very glad you didn’t get up, for you might have caught it; and you couldn’t stand being ill, with all the matches going on.  And you’re in the eleven, too, I hear.  I’m so glad.”

“Yes; ain’t it jolly?” said Tom proudly.  “I’m ninth too.  I made forty at the last pie-match, and caught three fellows out.  So I was put in above Jones and Tucker.  Tucker’s so savage, for he was head of the twenty-two.”

“Well, I think you ought to be higher yet,” said Arthur, who was as jealous for the renown of Tom in games as Tom was for his as a scholar.

“Never mind.  I don’t care about cricket or anything now you’re getting well, Geordie; and I shouldn’t have hurt, I know, if they’d have let me come up.  Nothing hurts me.  But you’ll get about now directly, won’t you?  You won’t believe how clean I’ve kept the study.  All your things are just as you left them; and I feed the old magpie just when you used, though I have to come in from big-side for him, the old rip.  He won’t look pleased all I can do, and sticks his head first on one side and then on the other, and blinks at me before he’ll begin to eat, till I’m half inclined to box his ears.  And whenever East comes in, you should see him hop off to the window, dot and go one, though Harry wouldn’t touch a feather of him now.”

Arthur laughed.  “Old Gravey has a good memory; he can’t forget the sieges of poor Martin’s den in old times.”  He paused a moment, and then went on:  “You can’t think how often I’ve been thinking of old Martin since I’ve been ill.  I suppose one’s mind gets restless, and likes to wander off to strange, unknown places.  I wonder what queer new pets the old boy has got.  How he must be revelling in the thousand new birds, beasts, and fishes!”

Tom felt a pang of jealousy, but kicked it out in a moment.  “Fancy him on a South Sea island, with the Cherokees, or Patagonians, or some such wild niggers!” (Tom’s ethnology and geography were faulty, but sufficient for his needs.) “They’ll make the old Madman cock medicine-man, and tattoo him all over.  Perhaps he’s cutting about now all blue, and has a squaw and a wigwam.  He’ll improve their boomerangs, and be able to throw them too, without having old Thomas sent after him by the Doctor to take them away.”