and was agreeably surprised as each twenty-four hours passed and
left me still unfixed. But I knew the hour would come, and it did.

I looked for frontal attack from Buck, not subtlety; but, when the
attack came, it was so excessively frontal that my chief emotion
was a sort of paralysed amazement. It seemed incredible that such
peculiarly Wild Western events could happen in peaceful England,
even in so isolated a spot as Sanstead House.

It had been one of those interminable days which occur only at
schools. A school, more than any other institution, is dependent
on the weather. Every small boy rises from his bed of a morning
charged with a definite quantity of devilry; and this, if he is to
sleep the sound sleep of health, he has got to work off somehow
before bedtime. That is why the summer term is the one a master
longs for, when the intervals between classes can be spent in the
open. There is no pleasanter sight for an assistant-master at a
private school than that of a number of boys expending their venom
harmlessly in the sunshine.

On this particular day, snow had begun to fall early in the
morning, and, while his pupils would have been only too delighted
to go out and roll in it by the hour, they were prevented from
doing so by Mr Abney's strict orders. No schoolmaster enjoys
seeing his pupils running risks of catching cold, and just then Mr
Abney was especially definite on the subject. The Saturnalia which
had followed Mr MacGinnis' nocturnal visit to the school had had
the effect of giving violent colds to three lords, a baronet, and
the younger son of an honourable. And, in addition to that, Mr
Abney himself, his penetrating tenor changed to a guttural croak,