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The Head looked puzzled.

‘Him. The chap, you know.’

It is greatly to the Head’s credit that he grasped the meaning of these words. Long study of the classics had quickened his faculty for seeing sense in passages where there was none. The situation dawned upon him.

‘Do you mean to tell me, Dorothy, that it was Charteris who came to your assistance yesterday?’

Dorothy nodded energetically.

‘He gave the men beans,’ she said. ‘He did, really,’ she went on, regardless of the Head’s look of horror. ‘He used right and left with considerable effect.’

Dorothy’s brother, a keen follower of the Ring, had been good enough some days before to read her out an extract from an account in The Sportsman of a match at the National Sporting Club, and the account had been much to her liking. She regarded it as a masterpiece of English composition.

‘Dorothy,’ said the Headmaster, ‘run away to bed.’ A suggestion which she treated with scorn, it wanting a clear two hours to her legal bedtime. ‘I must speak to your mother about your deplorable habit of using slang. Dear me, I must certainly speak to her.’

And, shamefully unabashed, Dorothy retired.

The Head was silent for a few minutes after she had gone; then he turned to Charteris again.

‘In consideration of this, Charteris, I shall–er–mitigate slightly the punishment I had intended to give you.’

Charteris murmured his gratification.

‘But,’ continued the Head sternly, ‘I cannot overlook the offence. I have my duty to consider. You will therefore write me–er–ten lines of Virgil by tomorrow evening, Charteris.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Latin and English,’ said the relentless pedagogue.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And, Charteris–I am speaking now–er–unofficially, not as a headmaster, you understand–if in future you would cease to break School rules simply as a matter of principle, for that, I fancy, is what it amounts to, I–er–well, I think we should get on better together. And that is, on my part at least, a consummation–er–devoutly to be wished. Good-night, Charteris.’

‘Good-night, sir.’

The Head extended a large hand. Charteris took it, and his departure.

The Headmaster opened his book again, and turned over a new leaf. Charteris at the same moment, walking slowly in the direction of Merevale’s, was resolving for the future to do the very same thing. And he did.