The senior boy of the school, you have heard, was Gaunt. The other
three seniors, Tom Channing, Harry Huntley, and Gerald Yorke, possessed
a considerable amount of power; but nothing equal to that vested in
Gaunt. They had all three entered the school on the same day, and had
kept pace with each other as they worked their way up in it,
consequently not one could be said to hold priority; and when Gaunt
should quit the school at the following Michaelmas, one of the three
would become senior. Which, you may wish to ask? Ah, we don't know
that, yet.

Charley Channing--a truthful, good boy, full of integrity, kind and
loving by nature, and a universal favourite--sat tilted on the books.
He was wishing with all his heart that he had not seen something which
he had seen that day. He had been going through the cloisters in the
afternoon, about the time that all Helstonleigh, college boys included,
were in the streets watching for the sheriff's procession, when he saw
one of the seniors steal (Bywater had been happy in the epithet) out of
the cathedral into the quiet cloisters, peer about him, and then throw
a broken ink-bottle into the graveyard which the cloisters enclosed.
The boy stole away without perceiving Charley; and there sat Charley
now, trying to persuade himself by some ingenious sophistry--which,
however, he knew _was_ sophistry--that the senior might not have been
the one in the mischief; that the ink-bottle might have been on
legitimate duty, and that he threw it from him because it was broken.
Charles Channing did not like these unpleasant secrets. There was in
the school a code of honour--the boys called it so--that one should not
tell of another; and if the head-master ever went the length of calling
the seniors to his aid, those seniors deemed themselves compelled to
declare it, if the fault became known to them. Hence Tom Channing's