The boys, taken completely by surprise, but accepting this decree as they accepted everything else, because it never occurred to them it could be otherwise, trotted off, not very disconsolate, to the school-room.  It was very hot out of doors; it was cool in the third division school-room.

They got out their steel pens, their double-lined copy books, and began mechanically copying out the Greek irregular verbs, with which they were so superficially familiar, and from which they were so fundamentally divorced.

“Whitey,” said Gordon, “was in an awful wax!”

“I don’t care,” said Smith.  “I’d just as soon sit here as look on at that beastly match.”

“But why,” said Hart, “have we got to do two hours’ work?”

“Oh,” said Gordon, “he’s just in a wax, that’s all.”

And the matter was not further discussed.  At six o’clock the boys had tea.  The cricket match had, of course, resulted in a crushing and overwhelming defeat for St. James’s.  The rival eleven had been asked to tea; there were cherries for tea in their honour.

When Gordon, Smith, and Hart minor entered the dining-room they at once perceived that an atmosphere of gloom and menacing storm was overhanging the school.  Their spirits had hitherto been unflagging; they sat next to each other at the tea-table, but no sooner had they sat down than they were seized by that terrible, uncomfortable feeling so familiar to schoolboys, that something unpleasant was impending, some crime, some accusation; some doom, the nature of which they could not guess, was lying in ambush.  This was written on the headmaster’s face.  The headmaster sat at a square table in the centre of the dining-room.  The boys sat round on the further side of three tables which formed the three sides of the square room.

The meal passed in gloomy silence.  Gordon, Smith and Hart began a fitful conversation, but a message was immediately passed up to them from Mr. Whitehead, who sat at the bottom of one of the tables, to stop talking.  At the end of tea the guests filed out of the room.

The headmaster stood up and rapped on his table with a knife.

“The whole school,” he said, “will come to the library in ten minutes’ time.”

The boys left the dining-room.  They began to whisper to one another with bated breath.  “What’s the matter?” And the boys of the second division shook their heads ominously, and pointing to Gordon, Smith, and Hart, said:  “You’re in for it this time!” The boys of the first division were too important to take any notice of the rest of the school, and retired to the first division school-room in dignified silence.

Ten minutes later the whole school was assembled in the library, from which one flight of stairs led to the upper storeys.  The staircase was shrouded from view by a dark curtain hanging from a Gothic arch; it was through this curtain that the headmaster used dramatically to appear on important occasions, and it was up this staircase that boys guilty of cardinal offences were led off to corporal punishment.