During the four days that followed the characters, bodies and souls of the fugitives swelled into epic proportions. Four days in such circumstances can, at a small school, resemble centuries of time. No one thought or discussed anything but this, and there was not a boy in the place, from the eldest to the youngest, but envied those two passionately and would have given a year of holiday to be with them.

On Monday Mr. Thompson went up to London. The rumours that sprang to life were marvellous. Stokesley had been seen at a theatre in London, and had been chased all the way down the Strand by an enormous crowd. Raikes had struck a policeman, and been put in a cell. They had been to Buckingham Palace, and interviewed Her Majesty. They had started on a slaver for the South Seas. They had taken up jobs as waiters in a London restaurant....

To Jeremy these days were torture. In the first place he was dazzled by their splendour. Why had he been such a fool as to refuse to go with them? One might die to-morrow. Here was his great adventure offered to him, and he had rejected it.

As the tales circulated round him the atmosphere became more and more romantic. He forgot the real Stokesley and saw no longer the genuine Raikes. It no longer occurred to him that Stokesley had warts; he refused to see that so familiar picture of Raikes washing himself in the morning, trickling the cold water over his head, his two large ears, projecting, crimson. Clothed in gold and silver, they swung dazzling through the air, rosy clouds supporting them, to the haven where they would be—the haven of the South Seas, with gleaming, glittering sands, blue waters, monkeys in thousands, and pearls and diamonds for the asking.

Under these alluring visions even the football faded into grey monotony. In a practice game on Monday he played so badly that he expected to lose all chance of playing in the match at the end of the week; but, fortunately for him, everyone else played badly too. The mind of the school was in London, following the flight, the chase, the final escape—no time now for football or anything else.

The heroes that Stokesley and Raikes now were! Anyone who had an anecdote, however trivial, was listened to by admiring crowds. It was recalled how Stokesley, when a new boy, had endured the first tossing in the blanket with marvellous phlegm and indifference; how Raikes, when receiving a hamper from an affectionate aunt, had instantly distributed it round all his table, so that almost at once there was none of it remaining. How Stokesley had once conducted a money-lending establishment with extraordinary force and daring for more than a fortnight; how Raikes had fought Bates Major, a boy almost twice his size, and had lasted into the sixth round—and so on, and so on.

Jeremy, of course, was affected by all this reminiscence, and himself recalled how, in the dormitory, Stokesley had said this clever thing, and Raikes had been on that occasion strangely daring. But behind this romance there was something more.

He was strangely and, as the hours advanced, quite desperately bothered by the question of his lie. In the first immediate instance of it he had not been bothered by it at all. When he had stood in Thompson’s study it had not seemed to him a lie at all; so thickly clothed was he by his school convention that it had seemed the natural, the absolutely inevitable thing to do. His duty was not to give Stokesley and Raikes away, that was all.

But afterwards Thompson’s troubled face came back to him, and that serious warning that perhaps, if he kept his knowledge back, the lives of hundreds of people might be affected. It was true that by the following morning everything that he knew was known by everyone else. The station-master from the junction came up after breakfast and gave information about the boys. He had thought it strange that they should be going up to London by themselves, but they had seemed so completely self-possessed that he had not liked simply on his own authority to stop them.

But had Jeremy told all that he knew on that first Sunday evening many precious hours might have been gained and the fugitives caught at once. Alone in that little dormitory at night, the two empty beds staring at him, he had fallen into dreams, distressing, accusing nightmares. By Tuesday morning he was not at all sure that he was not a desperate criminal, worthy of prison and perhaps even of hanging.

He longed—how desperately he longed!—to discuss the matter with Riley. Riley was so full of wisdom and common sense and knew so much more than did Jeremy about life in general. But, having gone so far, he would not turn back, but he moved about on that Tuesday like Christian with his pack.

Then, on Tuesday evening, came the great news. They had been caught—they had given themselves up. They had spent all their money. Thompson was bringing them back with him on Wednesday morning.

The school waited breathlessly for the arrival. No one saw anything; only by midday it was whispered by everyone that they were there. By the afternoon it was known that they were shut away in the infirmary. No one was to see them or to speak to them.

During that morning how swiftly the atmosphere had changed! Only yesterday those two had been sailing for the South Seas; now, ostracized, waiting in horrible confinement for some terrible doom; they were only glorious, like one of Byron’s heroes, in their “damned prospects” and “fatal overthrow.” All that day Jeremy thought of them, feeling in some unanalysed way as though he himself were responsible for their failure. Had he not done this, had he thought of that—and what would Thompson do?

At the end of breakfast next morning it was known. He made them a speech, speaking with a new gravity that even the smallest boy in the school (young Phipps, Junr., only about two feet high) could feel. He said that, as was by this time known to all of them, two of their number had run away, had spent several days in London, had been found, and brought back to the school. They would all understand how serious a crime this was, the unhappiness that it must have brought on the boys’ parents, the harm that it might have done to the school itself. The boys were young; they had, apparently, no especial grievance with their school life, and they had done what they had from a silly, false sense of adventure rather than from any impulse of wickedness or desire for evil.

Nevertheless, they had wilfully made many people unhappy and broken laws upon whose preservation the very life of their school, that they all loved, depended. He was not sure that they had not done even more than that. He could not tell, of course, whether there were any boys in that room who had known of this before it occurred—he hoped from the bottom of his heart that no boy had told him an untruth; he knew that they had a code of their own, that whatever happened they were never to “tell” about another boy. That code had its uses, but it could be carried too far. All the misery of these four days might have been spared had some boy given information at once. He would say no more about that. The boys had been given a choice between expulsion and a public flogging. They had both, without hesitation, chosen the flogging. The whole school was to be present that evening in Big Hall before first preparation.