I was fortunately out of school the second hour.  I employed most of it in balancing myself.  A perfectly reasonable creature, I visited the chief.  He was a chubby, rotund man, with a circular body and a circular visage, and he wore great circular gold spectacles.  He looked like a figure in the Third Book of Euclid.  But his eyes sparkled like bits of glass in the sun.

“Well, Ordeyne?” he inquired, looking up from letters to parents.

“I have come to ask you to accept my resignation,” said I.  “I would like you to release me at once.”

“Come, come, things are not as bad as all that,” said he, kindly.

I looked stupidly at him for a moment.

“Of course I know you’ve got one or two troublesome forms,” he continued.

Then I winced.  His conjecture hurt me horribly.

“Oh, it’s nothing to do with my incompetence,” I interrupted.

“What is it, then?”

“My grandfather, two uncles, two nephews and a valet were drowned a day or two ago in the Mediterranean,” I answered, calmly.

I have since been struck by the crudity of this announcement.  It took my chief’s breath away.

“I deeply sympathise with you,” he said at last.

“Thank you,” said I.

“A terrible catastrophe.  No wonder it has upset you.  Horrible!  Six living human beings!  Three generations of men!”

“That’s just it,” said I.  “Three generations of my family swept away, leaving me now at the head of it.”

At this moment the chief’s wife came into the library with the morning paper in her hand.  On seeing me she rushed forward.

“Have you had bad news?”

“Yes.  Is it in the paper?”

“I was coming to show my husband.  The name is an uncommon one.  I wondered if they might be relatives of yours.”

I bowed acquiescence.  The chief looked at the paragraph below his wife’s indicating thumb, then he looked at me as if I, too, had suffered a seachange.

“I had no idea—­” he said.  “Why, now—­now you are Sir Marcus Ordeyne!”

“It sounds idiotic, doesn’t it? " said I, with a smile.  “But I suppose I -am.”

And so came my release from captivity.  I was profoundly affected by the awful disaster, but it would be sheer hypocrisy if I said that I felt personal grief.  I knew none of the dead, of whom I verily believe the valet was the worthiest man.  My grandfather and uncles had ignored my existence.  Not a helping hand had they stretched out to my widowed mother in her poverty, when one kindly touch would have meant all.

They do not seem to have been a lovable race, the Ordeynes.  What my father, the youngest son, was like, I have no idea, as he died when I was two years old, but my mother, who was somewhat stern and puritanical, spoke of him very much as she would have spoken of the prophet Joel, had he been a personal acquaintance.