'Well?' said Gethryn. 'Hasn't he come?'

'A little,' said Marriott, 'just a little. I went down to the fags'
room, and when I opened the door I noticed a certain weird stillness in
the atmosphere. There is usually a row going on that you could cut with
a knife. I looked about. The room was apparently empty. Then I observed
a quaint object on the horizon. Do you know one Skinner by any chance?'

'My dear chap!' said Gethryn. Skinner was a sort of juvenile Professor
Moriarty, a Napoleon of crime. He reeked of crime. He revelled in his
wicked deeds. If a Dormitory-prefect was kept awake at night by some
diabolically ingenious contrivance for combining the minimum of risk
with the maximum of noise, then it was Skinner who had engineered the
thing. Again, did a master, playing nervously forward on a bad pitch at
the nets to Gosling, the School fast bowler, receive the ball gaspingly
in the small ribs, and look round to see whose was that raucous laugh
which had greeted the performance, he would observe a couple of yards
away Skinner, deep in conversation with some friend of equally
villainous aspect. In short, in a word, the only adequate word, he was
Skinner.

'Well?' said Reece.

'Skinner,' proceeded Marriott, 'was seated in a chair, bleeding freely
into a rather dirty pocket-handkerchief. His usual genial smile was
hampered by a cut lip, and his right eye was blacked in the most
graceful and pleasing manner. I made tender inquiries, but could get
nothing from him except grunts. So I departed, and just outside the
door I met young Lee, and got the facts out of him. It appears that P.