Heriot was merely reported guilty of insolence.  He took his five hundred lines of Virgil with his usual sarcastic dignity:  all he said to Mr. Rippenger was, ‘Let it be about Dido, sir,’ which set several of the boys upon Dido’s history, but Heriot was condemned to the battles with Turnus.  My share in this event secured Heriot’s friendship to me without costing me the slightest inconvenience.  ‘Papa would never punish you,’ Julia said; and I felt my rank.  Nor was it wonderful I should when Mr. Rippenger was constantly speaking of my father’s magnificence in my presence before company.  Allowed to draw on him largely for pocket-money, I maintained my father’s princely reputation in the school.  At times, especially when the holidays arrived and I was left alone with Julia, I had fits of mournfulness, and almost thought the boys happier than I was.  Going home began to seem an unattainable thing to me.  Having a father, too, a regular father, instead of a dazzling angel that appeared at intervals, I considered a benefaction, in its way, some recompense to the boys, for their not possessing one like mine.  My anxiety was relieved by my writing letters to my father, addressed to the care of Miss Julia Rippenger, and posting them in her work-basket.  She favoured me with very funny replies, signed, ‘Your own ever-loving Papa,’ about his being engaged killing Bengal tigers and capturing white elephants, a noble occupation that gave me exciting and consolatory dreams of him.

We had at last a real letter of his, dated from a foreign city; but he mentioned nothing of coming to me.  I understood that Mr. Rippenger was disappointed with it.

Gradually a kind of cloud stole over me.  I no longer liked to ask for pocket-money; I was clad in a suit of plain cloth; I was banished from the parlour, and only on Sunday was I permitted to go to Julia.  I ceased to live in myself.  Through the whole course of lessons, at play-time, in my bed, and round to morning bell, I was hunting my father in an unknown country, generally with the sun setting before me:  I ran out of a wood almost into a brook to see it sink as if I had again lost sight of him, and then a sense of darkness brought me back to my natural consciousness, without afflicting me much, but astonishing me.  Why was I away from him?  I could repeat my lessons in the midst of these dreams quite fairly; it was the awakening among the circle of the boys that made me falter during a recital and ask myself why I was there and he absent?  They had given over speculating on another holiday and treat from my father; yet he had produced such an impression in the school that even when I had descended to the level of a total equality with them, they continued to have some consideration for me.  I was able to talk of foreign cities and could tell stories, and I was, besides, under the immediate protection of Heriot.  But now the shadow of a great calamity fell on me, for my dear Heriot announced his intention of leaving the school next half.