So Tom went on even to the fifth half-year — till he was turned sixteen — at King’s Lorton, while Maggie was growing with a rapidity which her aunts considered highly reprehensible, at Miss Firniss’s boarding-school in the ancient town of Laceham on the Floss, with cousin Lucy for her companion. In her early letters to Tom she had always sent her love to Philip, and asked many questions about him, which were answered by brief sentences about Tom’s toothache, and a turf-house which he was helping to build in the garden, with other items of that kind. She was pained to hear Tom say in the holidays that Philip was as queer as ever again, and often cross. They were no longer very good friends, she perceived; and when she reminded Tom that he ought always to love Philip for being so good to him when his foot was bad, he answered: “Well, it isn’t my fault; I don’t do anything to him.” She hardly ever saw Philip during the remainder of their school-life; in the Midsummer holidays he was always away at the seaside, and at Christmas she could only meet him at long intervals in the street of St. Ogg’s. When they did meet, she remembered her promise to kiss him, but, as a young lady who had been at a boarding-school, she knew now that such a greeting was out of the question, and Philip would not expect it. The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach — impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed.

But when their father was actually engaged in the long-threatened lawsuit, and Wakem, as the agent at once of Pivart and Old Harry, was acting against him, even Maggie felt, with some sadness, that they were not likely ever to have any intimacy with Philip again; the very name of Wakem made her father angry, and she had once heard him say that if that crook-backed son lived to inherit his father’s ill-gotten gains, there would be a curse upon him. “Have as little to do with him at school as you can, my lad,” he said to Tom; and the command was obeyed the more easily because Mr. Sterling by this time had two additional pupils; for though this gentleman’s rise in the world was not of that meteor-like rapidity which the admirers of his extemporaneous eloquence had expected for a preacher whose voice demanded so wide a sphere, he had yet enough of growing prosperity to enable him to increase his expenditure in continued disproportion to his income.

As for Tom’s school course, it went on with mill-like monotony, his mind continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a medium uninteresting or unintelligible ideas. But each vacation he brought home larger and larger drawings with the satiny rendering of landscape, and water-colors in vivid greens, together with manuscript books full of exercises and problems, in which the handwriting was all the finer because he gave his whole mind to it. Each vacation he brought home a new book or two, indicating his progress through different stages of history, Christian doctrine, and Latin literature; and that passage was not entirely without results, besides the possession of the books. Tom’s ear and tongue had become accustomed to a great many words and phrases which are understood to be signs of an educated condition; and though he had never really applied his mind to any one of his lessons, the lessons had left a deposit of vague, fragmentary, ineffectual notions. Mr. Tulliver, seeing signs of acquirement beyond the reach of his own criticism, thought it was probably all right with Tom’s education; he observed, indeed, that there were no maps, and not enough “summing”; but he made no formal complaint to Mr. Stelling. It was a puzzling business, this schooling; and if he took Tom away, where could he send him with better effect?

By the time Tom had reached his last quarter at King’s Lorton, the years had made striking changes in him since the day we saw him returning from Mr. Jacobs’s academy. He was a tall youth now, carrying himself without the least awkwardness, and speaking without more shyness than was a becoming symptom of blended diffidence and pride; he wore his tail-coat and his stand-up collars, and watched the down on his lip with eager impatience, looking every day at his virgin razor, with which he had provided himself in the last holidays. Philip had already left — at the autumn quarter — that he might go to the south for the winter, for the sake of his health; and this change helped to give Tom the unsettled, exultant feeling that usually belongs to the last months before leaving school. This quarter, too, there was some hope of his father’s lawsuit being decided; that made the prospect of home more entirely pleasurable. For Tom, who had gathered his view of the case from his father’s conversation, had no doubt that Pivart would be beaten.

Tom had not heard anything from home for some weeks — a fact which did not surprise him, for his father and mother were not apt to manifest their affection in unnecessary letters — when, to his great surprise, on the morning of a dark, cold day near the end of November, he was told, soon after entering the study at nine o’clock, that his sister was in the drawing-room. It was Mrs. Stelling who had come into the study to tell him, and she left him to enter the drawing-room alone.

Maggie, too, was tall now, with braided and coiled hair; she was almost as tall as Tom, though she was only thirteen; and she really looked older than he did at that moment. She had thrown off her bonnet, her heavy braids were pushed back from her forehead, as if it would not bear that extra load, and her young face had a strangely worn look, as her eyes turned anxiously toward the door. When Tom entered she did not speak, but only went up to him, put her arms round his neck, and kissed him earnestly. He was used to various moods of hers, and felt no alarm at the unusual seriousness of her greeting.

“Why, how is it you’re come so early this cold morning, Maggie? Did you come in the gig?” said Tom, as she backed toward the sofa, and drew him to her side.

“No, I came by the coach. I’ve walked from the turnpike.”

“But how is it you’re not at school? The holidays have not begun yet?”

“Father wanted me at home,” said Maggie, with a slight trembling of the lip. “I came home three or four days ago.”

“Isn’t my father well?” said Tom, rather anxiously.

“Not quite,” said Maggie. “He’s very unhappy, Tom. The lawsuit is ended, and I came to tell you because I thought it would be better for you to know it before you came home, and I didn’t like only to send you a letter.”

“My father hasn’t lost?” said Tom, hastily, springing from the sofa, and standing before Maggie with his hands suddenly thrust into his pockets.

“Yes, dear Tom,” said Maggie, looking up at him with trembling.

Tom was silent a minute or two, with his eyes fixed on the floor. Then he said:

“My father will have to pay a good deal of money, then?”

“Yes,” said Maggie, rather faintly.

“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Tom, bravely, not translating the loss of a large sum of money into any tangible results. “But my father’s very much vexed, I dare say?” he added, looking at Maggie, and thinking that her agitated face was only part o............