the best of his ability, including that
relating to the dead mouse, which he had great difficulty in rescuing
from the clutches of a hungry dog on the way down, and then returned
with Paul's raisins in one pocket, the mixed sweets in another, the book
in another, and the other boy's bat over his shoulder.

Paul was awaiting him at the gate of Saint Dominic's.

"Got them?" he shouted out, when Stephen was still twenty yards off.

Stephen nodded.

"How much?" inquired Paul.

"Eighteenpence."

"You duffer! I didn't mean them--pudding raisins I meant, about
sixpence. I say, you'd better take them back, hadn't you?"

This was gratitude! "I can't now," said Stephen.

"I've got to get somebody's tea ready--I say, where's his study?"

"Whose? Loman's? Oh, it's about the eighth on the right in the third
passage; next to the one with the kicks on it. What a young muff you
are to get this kind of raisin! I say, you'd have plenty of time to
change them."

"I really wouldn't," said Stephen, hurrying off, and perhaps guessing
that before he met Mr Paul again the raisins would be past changing.

The boy to whom belonged the mixed sweets was no more grateful than Paul
had been.

"You've chosen the very ones I hate," he said, surveying the selection
with a look of disgust.

"You said peppermint," said Stephen.

"But I didn't say green, beastly things!" grumbled the other. "Here,
you can have one of them, it's sure to make you sick!"

Stephen said "Thank you," and went off to deliver up the bat.

"What a time you've been!" was all the thanks he got in that quarter.
"Why couldn't you come straight back with it?"

This was gratifying. Stephen was learning at least one lesson that
afternoon--that a fag, if he ever expects to be thanked for anything he
does, is greatly mistaken. He went off in a highly injured frame of
mind to Loman's study.

Master Paul's directions might have been more explicit--"The eighth door
on the right; next to the one with the kicks." Now, as it happened, the
door with the kicks on it was itself the eighth door on the right, with
a study on either side of it, and which of these two was Loman's Stephen
could not by the unaided light of nature determine. He peeped into
Number 7; it was empty.

"Perhaps he's cut his name on the door," thought Stephen.

He might have done so, but as there were about fifty different letters
cut on the door, he was not much wiser for that.

"I'd bett