to be out, exit would be easy. As luck would have it she was out, and
in another minute Jim had crossed the Rubicon and was standing on the
gravel drive which led to the front gate.

A sharp sprint took him to the Pavilion. Now the difficulty was not how
to get out, but how to get in. Theoretically, it should have been the
easiest of tasks, but in practice there were plenty of obstacles to
success. He tried the lower windows, but they were firmly fixed. There
had been a time when one of them would yield to a hard kick and fly
bodily out of its frame, but somebody had been caught playing that game
not long before, and Jim remembered with a pang that not only had the
window been securely fastened up, but the culprit had had a spell of
extra tuition and other punishments which had turned him for the time
into a hater of his species. His own fate, he knew, would be even
worse, for a prefect is supposed to have something better to do in his
spare time than breaking into pavilions. It would mean expulsion
perhaps, or, at the least, the loss of his prefect's cap, and Jim did
not want to lose that. Still the thing had to be done if he meant to
score any marks at all in the forthcoming exam. He wavered a while
between a choice of methods, and finally fixed on the crudest of all.
No one was likely to be within earshot, thought he, so he picked up the
largest stone he could find, took as careful aim as the dim light would
allow, and hove it. There was a sickening crash, loud enough, he
thought, to bring the whole School down on him, followed by a prolonged
rattle as the broken pieces of glass fell to the ground.

He held his breath and listened. For a moment all was still, uncannily
still. He could hear the tops of the trees groaning in the slight
breeze that had sprung up, and far away the distant roar of a train.
Then a queer thing happened. He heard a quiet thud, as if somebody had