youth--a change that half-fascinated and half-repelled her.

Then, for the next few days, Tom plunged deeper and deeper downwards. He
left off pulling on the river, shunned his old friends, and lived with a
set of men who were ready enough to let him share all their brutal
orgies.

Drysdale, with whom Tom had been on good terms, noted the difference,
and advised him "to cut the Choughs business."

"You're not the sort of a fellow to go in for this kind of thing," he
said. "I'll be hanged if it won't kill you, or make a devil of you
before long! Make up your mind to cut the whole concern, old fellow!"

"I'm awfully wretched, Drysdale," was all Tom could say.

All the same, Tom could not follow Drysdale's advice at once and break
off his visits to the Choughs altogether.

The real crisis was over. He had managed to pass through the eye of the
storm, and was drifting into the skirts of it, conscious of an escape
from utter shipwreck.

His visits to the Choughs became shorter; he never stayed behind now
after the other men, and avoided interviews with Patty alone as
diligently as he had sought them before.

Patty, unable to account for this fresh change of manner, was piqued,
and ready to revenge herself in a hundred little ways. If she had been
really in love with him it would have been a different matter; but she
was not. In the last six weeks she certainly had often had visions of
the pleasures of being a lady and keeping servants, but her liking was
not more than skin deep.

Of late, indeed, she had been much more frightened than attracted by the
conduct of her admirer, and really felt it a relief, notwithstanding her
pique, when he retired into a less demonstrative state.

Before the end of that summer term Tom had it made up with Hardy, and it
was Hardy who, at Tom's request, called in at the Choughs, just to see
how things were going on. Tom saw at a glance that something had
happened when Hardy appeared again.

"What is it? She is not ill?" he said quickly.

"No; quite well, her aunt says."

"You didn't see her, then?"

"No the fact is, she has gone home."

_IV.--The Master's Term_

The years speed by, bringing their changes to St. Ambrose. Hardy is a
fellow and tutor of the college in Tom's second year, and Drysdale has
been requested to remove his name from the books. Tom is all for
politics now, and the theories he propounds in the Union gain him the
name of Chartist Brown.

In his third