“Then who made it?” said the Head. “And also, for I perceive the point is blunted, who threw it?”
Dead silence on David’s part.
“Do you know?” asked the Head.
“Yes, sir,” said David.
“And do you refuse to tell me? I am not here to be bullied, I may remind you.”
David felt slightly sick, but he had swallowed a good deal of chewed pen-handle.
“Do you refuse to tell me?” repeated the Head.
“Yes, sir,” said David.
Then came one of those strange calms in the middle of cyclones, which sometimes puzzled the boys. But their conjecture, a perfectly right one, was that the Head, in spite of questions like these, did not like “sneaking.” Anyhow, for a moment his fierceness faded, and he nodded at David, just as one pal might nod to another in sympathetic assent.
“Quite right, my boy,” he said.