“What you got on?” he repeated.

“Oh, nothin’,” said Penrod, with an indifference assumed at great cost to his nervous system.

The elate Maurice was inspired to set up as a wit.  “Then you’re nakid!” he shouted exultantly.  “Penrod Schofield says he hasn’t got nothin’ on under that ole golf cape!  He’s nakid!  He’s nakid.”

The indelicate little girls giggled delightedly, and a javelin pierced the inwards of Penrod when he saw that the Child Elaine, amber-curled and beautiful Marjorie Jones, lifted golden laughter to the horrid jest.

Other boys and girls came flocking to the uproar.  “He’s nakid, he’s nakid!” shrieked the Child Sir Galahad.  “Penrod Schofield’s nakid!  He’s Na-A-A-Kid!”

“Hush, hush!” said Mrs. Lora Rewbush, pushing her way into the group.  “Remember, we are all little knights and ladies to-day.  Little knights and ladies of the Table Round would not make so much noise.  Now children, we must begin to take our places on the stage.  Is everybody here?”

Penrod made his escape under cover of this diversion:  he slid behind Mrs. Lora Rewbush, and being near a door, opened it unnoticed and went out quickly, closing it behind him.  He found himself in a narrow and vacant hallway which led to a door marked “Janitor’s Room.”

Burning with outrage, heart-sick at the sweet, cold-blooded laughter of Marjorie Jones, Penrod rested his elbows upon a window-sill and speculated upon the effects of a leap from the second story.  One of the reasons he gave it up was his desire to live on Maurice Levy’s account:  already he was forming educational plans for the Child Sir Galahad.

A stout man in blue overalls passed through the hallway muttering to himself petulantly.  “I reckon they’ll find that hall hot enough now!” he said, conveying to Penrod an impression that some too feminine women had sent him upon an unreasonable errand to the furnace.  He went into the Janitor’s Room and, emerging a moment later, minus the overalls, passed Penrod again with a bass rumble—­“Dern ’em!” it seemed he said—­and made a gloomy exit by the door at the upper end of the hallway.

The conglomerate and delicate rustle of a large, mannerly audience was heard as the janitor opened and closed the door; and stage-fright seized the boy.  The orchestra began an overture, and, at that, Penrod, trembling violently, tiptoed down the hall into the Janitor’s Room.  It was a cul-de-sac:  There was no outlet save by the way he had come.

Despairingly he doffed his mantle and looked down upon himself for a last sickening assurance that the stockings were as obviously and disgracefully Margaret’s as they had seemed in the mirror at home.  For a moment he was encouraged:  perhaps he was no worse than some of the other boys.  Then he noticed that a safety-pin had opened; one of those connecting the stockings with his trunks.  He sat down to fasten it and his eye fell for the first time with particular attention upon the trunks.  Until this instant he had been preoccupied with the stockings.