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‘Dis te minorem quod geris imperas,’ quoth Stalky, ruffling Winton’s lint-white locks. ‘Mustn’t jape with Number Five study. Don’t be too virtuous. Don’t brood over it. ‘Twon’t count against you in your future caree-ah. Cheer up, Pater.’

‘Pull him off my–er–essential guts, will you?’ said Beetle from beneath. ‘He’s squashin’ ’em.’

They dispersed to their studies.

* * * * *

No one, the owner least of all, can explain what is in a growing boy’s mind. It might have been the blind ferment of adolescence; Stalky’s random remarks about virtue might have stirred him; like his betters he might have sought popularity by way of clowning; or, as the Head asserted years later, the only known jest of his serious life might have worked on him, as a sober-sided man’s one love colours and dislocates all his after days. But, at the next lesson, mechanical drawing with Mr. Lidgett who as drawing-master had very limited powers of punishment, Winton fell suddenly from grace and let loose a live mouse in the form-room. The whole form, shrieking and leaping high, threw at it all the plaster cones, pyramids, and fruit in high relief–not to mention ink-pots–that they could lay hands on. Mr. Lidgett reported at once to the Head; Winton owned up to his crime, which, venial in the Upper Third, pardonable at a price in the Lower Fourth, was, of course, rank ruffianism on the part of a Fifth Form boy; and so, by graduated stages, he arrived at the Head’s study just before lunch, penitent, perturbed, annoyed with himself and–as the Head said to King in the corridor after the meal–more human than he had known him in seven years.

‘You see,’ the Head drawled on, ‘Winton’s only fault is a certain costive and unaccommodating virtue. So this comes very happily.’

‘I’ve never noticed any sign of it,’ said King. Winton was in King’s House, and though King as pro-consul might, and did, infernally oppress his own Province, once a black and yellow cap was in trouble at the hands of the Imperial authority King fought for him to the very last steps of Caesar’s throne.

‘Well, you yourself admitted just now that a mouse was beneath the occasion,’ the Head answered.

‘It was.’ Mr. King did not love Mr. Lidgett. ‘It should have been a rat. But–but–I hate to plead it–it’s the lad’s first offence.’

‘Could you have damned him more completely, King?’

‘Hm. What is the penalty?’ said King, in retreat, but keeping up a rear-guard action.

‘Only my usual few lines of Virgil to be shown up by tea-time.’

The Head’s eyes turned slightly to that end of the corridor where Mullins, Captain of the Games (‘Pot,’ ‘old Pot,’ or ‘Potiphar’ Mullins), was pinning up the usual Wednesday notice–‘Big, Middle, and Little Side Football–A to K, L to Z, 3 to 4.45 P.M.’

You cannot write out the Head’s usual few (which means five hundred) Latin lines and play football for one hour and three-quarters between the hours of 1.30 and 5 P.M. Winton had evidently no intention of trying to do so, for he hung about the corridor with a set face and an uneasy foot. Yet it was law in the school, compared with which that of the Medes and Persians was no more than a non-committal resolution, that any boy, outside the First Fifteen, who missed his football for any reason whatever, and had not a written excuse, duly signed by competent authority to explain his absence, would receive not less than three strokes with a ground-ash from the Captain of the Games, generally a youth between seventeen and eighteen years, rarely under eleven stone (‘Pot’ was nearer thirteen), and always in hard condition.

King knew without inquiry that the Head had given Winton no such excuse.

‘But he is practically a member of the First Fifteen. He has played for it all this term,’ said King. ‘I believe his Cap should have arrived last week.’

‘His Cap has not been given him. Officially, therefore, he is naught. I rely on old Pot.’