as evening when the housekeeper summoned him to the sick-room.
Arthur was lying on the sofa by the open window, through which the
rays of the western sun stole gently, lighting up his white face and
golden hair. Tom remembered a German picture of an angel which he
knew; often had he thought how transparent and golden and spirit-like
it was; and he shuddered to think how like it Arthur looked, and felt
a shock as if his blood had all stopped short, as he realized how near
the other world his friend must have been to look like that. Never
till that moment had he felt how his little chum had twined himself
round his heart-strings; and as he stole gently across the room and
knelt down, and put his arm round Arthur's head on the pillow, he felt
ashamed and half angry at his own red and brown face, and the bounding
sense of health and power which filled every fibre of his body, and
made every movement of mere living a joy to him. He needn't have
troubled himself; it was this very strength and power so different
from his own which drew Arthur so to him.

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 cricket-bats,
came up cheerily from below.

CONVALESCENCE.

"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, isn't it jolly?" said Tom, proudly; "I'm ninth, too. I made
forty at the last pie-match,[4] 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."

[4] #Pie-Match#: a match for a supper.