After this satisfactory compromise I got back into bed, happy at being spiritually solvent, and repeating:  “O God, don’t make me wake in the Old Locker Room; I wish I had someone to talk to.”

And almost immediately, as if my prayers were to be answered, I heard the noise of feet running towards my door.  It opened, and Bickerton, taking no notice of me, walked to the middle of the room, struck a match, and lit the gas.  Returning quickly, he said to someone else who was approaching:  “Oh, there you are.  I’ve lit the gas.  Bring him and get him to bed.  Put him beside the other ass for company.”  I sat up in my excitement, and with a thrill—­first of elation and then of dismay—­saw Stanley enter, bearing a boy, who, with arms and legs hanging limply downwards, was apparently lifeless:  his fair head was a contrast with Stanley’s dark blue sleeve on which it rested, and his brown eyes, wide open, were shining in the gas like glass.

Sec.4

In committee that morning Stanley and his colleagues had decided that Doe had deliberately asked for a Prefects’ Whacking, and must therefore be given an extra severe dose.  He should be summoned to judgment after games.  So, just as Doe, who was standing bare-chested in the changing room, had pushed his head into his vest, a voice, shouting to him by name, obliged him to withdraw it that he might see his questioner.  It was Pennybet, acting as Nuncius from the prefects.

“You’re in for it, Edgar Doe,” said this graceful person, leisurely taking a seat and watching Doe dress.  “I’m Cardinal Pennybet, papal legate from His Holiness Stanley the Great.  Bickerton had the sauce to send for me and to describe me as a ringleader in all your abominations.  I represented to him that he was a liar, and had been known to be from his birth, and that he probably cheated at Bridge; and he told me to jolly well disprove his accusation by fetching you along.  I explained they were making beasts of themselves over this Ray business—­”

“It would have been more sporting of you,” said Doe, drawing on his trousers and thanking Heaven that he was not as other men, nor even as this Pennybet, “if you’d stuck by Rupert and defied the prefects.”

“My dear Gray Doe,” this statesman expounded, “I go in for nothing that I can’t win.  And if you want to win, you must always make sure that the adverse conditions are beatable.  I like to tame circumstances to my own ends (hear, hear), but if they aren’t tamable I let them alone.  So now you know.  But about these prefects.  They’ve got their cane ready, so push your shirt well down.”

Doe studiously refused to hurry over his dressing, and, having assumed his jacket, went to a mirror and took great pains with his hair.  At this moment, though the hand which held the brush trembled, he was almost happy:  for he was playing, I know, at being a French Aristocrat going to the guillotine dressed like a gentleman.