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sun shone from one side of his face. When the time came for him to climb to Mr Pedigree’s room, he even took extra care in the arrangement of his black hair so that it hid the livid skull and purplish ear. Mr Pedigree opened the door to him with a shudder that had something feverish about it. He sat Matty down in a chair but himself went walking to and fro as if the movement were an anodyne for pain. He began to talk to Matty or to someone, as if there were an adult understanding in the room; and he had hardly begun when the door opened and Henderson stood on the threshold.
    Mr Pedigree shouted,
    “Get away, Ghastly! Get away! I won’t see you! Oh God—”
    Then Henderson burst into tears and fled away, clattering down the stairs and Mr Pedigree stood by the door, gazing down them until he could no longer hear the boy’s sobs or the noise of his feet. Even then, he stayed where he was, staring down. He groped in his pocket and brought out a large white handkerchief and he passed it over his forehead and across his mouth and Matty watched his back and understood nothing.
    At last Mr Pedigree shut the door but did not look at Matty. Instead, he began to move restlessly round the room, muttering half to himself and half to the boy. He said the most terrible thing in the world was thirst and that men had all kinds of thirst in all kinds of desert. All men were dypsomaniacs. Christ himself had cried out on the cross, “ ΔιΨάω .” The thirsts of men were not to be controlled so men were not to blame for them. To blame men for them would not be fair, that was where Ghastly was wrong, the foolish and beautiful young thing, but then he was too young to understand.
    At this point Mr Pedigree sank into the chair by his table and put his face in his hands.
    “ ΔιΨάω .”
    “Sir?”
    Mr Pedigree did not reply. Presently he took Matty’s book and told him as briefly as he could what was wrong with the map. Matty began to mend it. Mr Pedigree went to the window and stood, looking across the leads to the top of the fire-escape and beyond it to the horizon where the suburbs of London were now visible like some sort of growth.
    Henderson did not go back to his prep in the hall nor to thelavatories that had been his excuse for leaving it. He went towards the front of the building and stood outside the headmaster’s door for whole minutes. This was a clear sign of his misery; for it was no mean thing in his world to bypass the other members of the hierarchy. At last he tapped at the door, first timidly, then more loudly.
    “Well boy, what do you want?”
    “See you, sir.”
    “Who sent you?”
    “No one, sir.”
    That made the headmaster look up. He saw the boy had been crying very recently.
    “What form are you in?”
    “Mr Pedigree’s, sir.”
    “Name?”
    “Henderson, sir.”
    The headmaster opened his mouth to say ah! then closed it again. He pursed his lips instead. A worry began to form itself at the back of his mind.
    “Well?”
    “It’s, it’s about Mr Pedigree, sir.”
    The worry burst into full flower, the interviews, the assessment of blame, all the vexations, the report to the governors and at the end of everything the judge. For of course the man would plead guilty; or if it had not gone as far as that—
    He took a long, calculated look at the boy.
    “Well?”
    “Sir, Mr Pedigree, sir—he gives me lessons in his room—”
    “I know.”
    Now it was Henderson’s turn to be astonished. He stared at the headmaster, who was nodding judiciously. The headmaster was very near retirement, and from tiredness as much as anything switched his determination to the job of fending the boy off before anything irremediable had been said. Of course Pedigree would have to leave, but that could be arranged without much difficulty.
    “It’s kind of him,” said the headmaster fluently, “but I expect you find it a bit of a bore don’t you extra work like that on top of the rest, well, I understand, you’d