“Oh, that’s a bit too clever!” objected Stanley.  “Give the kid a chance.”

There’s nothing like sympathy for provoking misery and starting tears, and, as Stanley uttered that sentence, I decided that God had gone over to the prefects, and I would very much like to cry.  To drive back the tears I called to my aid all the callousness and sulkiness which I possess.  My face was the portrait of a sulky schoolboy as Stanley continued: 

“Now, Ray, which door did you leave the dormitory by?”

“I didn’t leave it.”

“I say,” suggested Kepple-Goddard, “couldn’t we send Bickerton to ask all the boys who sleep in the same dormitory whether they saw him leave it?”

“But they’d have been asleep, you ox!” put in Banana-Skin.

“Not necessarily.”

“But it doesn’t follow that, if they didn’t see him leave the dormitory, he didn’t do it,” objected Banana-Skin, the self-constituted prosecuting counsel, who didn’t want to see his case fall to the ground.

“Not quite.  But if they did see him, it proves him a liar and pretty well shows that he did.”

“There’s more sense in Kepple’s idea than one would expect,” gave Stanley as his decision.  “Dash away, Bicky, and find out.”

So Bickerton—­or shall I call him Mercury, the messenger of the gods?—­went, and I remained.  It was no matter to me what news he brought back.  I stood there, in the lions’ den, and counted the cracks in the ceiling.  I counted, also, the number of corners that the room possessed, and remembered how these same prefects had often (as when gods disport themselves) tried to make Doe and me stand in them for what they termed “unmitigated cheek”; how, giggling, we would fight them and kick them till they surrounded us and held us with our faces to the wall; and how we would call them all the rude names we could think of till they stuffed handkerchiefs in our mouths as a gag.  One of their favourite pastimes had been to do Doe’s hair, which they darkened with their wet brushes.  It was usually a difficult business, as Doe would treat the whole operation in a disorderly spirit and declare that it tickled.

Presently Bickerton was heard running up the corridor (rather undignified for a prefect) and came bursting into the room.

“Now listen,” said he, somewhat out of breath, and looking at a sheet of paper which he held in his hand.  “Two boys saw Ray get up and leave the dormitory last night.  They sleep on either side of him, and their names are Pennybet and Doe.  The latter isn’t sure whether he dreamt it.”

“Well, Ray, what have you got to say to that?” asked Stanley.

“Nothing,” I answered, “except that, if it’s true, I must have been walking in my sleep.  I did once, when I was a small boy.”

Stanley ignored my feeble defence.  He submitted to his colleagues that it was all his eye and Betty Martin; and the others nodded assent.  Then the Chairman, recovering from his slight relapse into the vernacular of the Fourth Form, enunciated the following remarkable sentence: