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like me to speak to Mr Pedigree wouldn’t you, I won’t say you said so, only say that we don’t think you’re strong enough for extra work so you needn’t worry anymore. Mr Pedigree simply won’t ask you to go there any more. Right?”
    Henderson went red. He dug at the rug with one toe and looked down at it.
    “So we won’t say anything about this visit to anyone else will we? I’m glad you came to see me, Henderson, very glad. You know, these little things can always be put right if you only talk to a, a grown-up about them. Good. Now cheer up and go back to your prep.”
    Henderson stood still. His face went even redder, seemed to swell; and from his screwed-up eyes the tears jetted as if his head was full of them.
    “Now come along, lad. It’s not as bad as that!”
    But it was worse. For neither of them knew where the root of the sorrow was. Helplessly the boy cried and helplessly the man watched, thinking, as it were, furtively of what he could not imagine with any precision; and wondering after all whether fending off was either wise or possible. Only when the tears had nearly ceased did he speak again.
    “Better? Eh? Look my dear boy, you’d better sit in that chair for a bit. I have to go—I’ll be back in a few minutes. You go off, when you feel like it. Right?”
    Nodding and smiling in a matey kind of way the headmaster went out, pulling the door to behind him. Henderson did not sit down in the offered chair. He stood where he was, the redness draining slowly from his face. He sniffed for a bit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Then he went away back to his desk in the hall.
    When the headmaster returned to his study and found that the boy had left he was relieved for a bit since nothing irremediable had been said; but then he remembered Pedigree with much irritation. He debated speaking to him at once but decided at last that he would leave the whole unpleasant business until the first hours of morning school, when his vital forces would have been restored by sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough, though the whole business could not be left longer than that; and remembering his earlier interview with Pedigree the headmaster flushed with genuine anger. The silly man!
    However, next morning when the headmaster braced himself for an interview he found himself receiving shocks instead ofdelivering them. Mr Pedigree was in his classroom but Henderson was not; and before the end of the first period, the new master, Edwin Bell—already “Dinger” to the whole school—had discovered Henderson and suffered an attack of hysterics. Mr Bell was led away but Henderson was left by the wall where the hollyhocks hid him. It was evident that he had fallen fifty feet from the leads or the fire-escape that was connected with them and he was dead as dead. “Dead,” said Merriman, the odd-job man, with emphasis and apparent enjoyment, “Dead cold and stiff,” which was what had touched off that Mr Bell. However, by the time Mr Bell had been quietened, Henderson’s body had been lifted and a gymshoe found beneath—with Matty’s name in it.
    That morning the headmaster sat looking at the place where Henderson had appeared before him and faced a few merciless facts. He knew himself to be, as he expressed it colloquially, to be for the high jump. He foresaw a hideously complicated transaction in which he would have to reveal that the boy had come to him, and that—
    Pedigree? The headmaster saw that he would never have carried on teaching this morning if he had known what happened during the night. It might be what a hardened criminal would do, or what someone capable of minute and detached calculation would do—but not Pedigree. So that who—?
    He still did not know what to do when the police came. When the inspector asked about the gymshoe, the headmaster could only say that boys frequently wore each other’s gear, the inspector knew what boys were; but the inspector did not. He asked to see Matty