er till that moment had he
felt how his little chum had twined himself round his heartstrings; 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 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