painful insult I could offer him. My duty to Doe demanded that it
should be something quite uncommon. And from a really fine selection
I had just chosen: "You're the biggest liar I've ever met, and, for
all I know, you're as big a thief," when I turned round and found he
was gone. Pennybet always left the field as its master.


§2

Within Radley's spacious class-room some twenty of us took our way
to our desks. Radley mounted his low platform, and, resting his
knuckles on his writing-table, gazed down upon us. He was a man of
over six feet, with the shoulders, chest, and waist of a forcing
batsman. His neck, perhaps, was a little too big, the fault of a
powerful frame; and the wrist that came below his cuff was such that
it made us wonder what was the size of his forearm. His mouth was
hard, and set above a squaring chin, so that you thought him
relentless, till his grey eyes shook your judgment.

"Let me see," he said, as he stood, looking down upon us, "you
should come to me for both periods this morning. Well, I shall
probably be away all the second period. You will come to this
class-room as usual, and Herr Reinhardt will take you in French."

"Oh, joy!" I muttered. Boys whom Radley could not see flipped their
fingers to express delight. Others lifted up the lids of their
desks, and behind these screens went through a pantomime that
suggested pleasure at good news. The fact was that the announcement
that we were to have second period with the German, Reinhardt, was
as good as promising us a holiday. Nay, it was rather better; for,