“Yours, Ferrars! You to disobey! You, of all boys, to set my orders at defiance!”
“It wasn’t an ordinary rat, sir.”
“I can see what sort of rat it was, sir, for myself,” thundered the Doctor. “This it is to consider a boy, to devote thought to him, to particularly commend him for his theological knowledge.”
“I don’t take any credit for knowing anything now, sir. It was the rat as much as me.”
“Robert Ferrars!” said the Doctor, in his caning voice, “you are now adding wicked buffoonery to an act in itself sufficiently disreputable!”
“I can’t explain, sir; I don’t mean any buffoonery. That rat was more to me than you’d think. It--it did help me somehow, and now it’s dead it wouldn’t be sportsmanlike to it to say not. And if you’ll let me b-bury it properly, I’ll be very thankful to you.”
The Doctor looked at Ferrars awfully close during this speech.
“Either you are lying,” he said, “or you suffer from some hysterical and neurotic condition, Robert Ferrars, which I have neither suspected nor discovered until this moment.”
Then he told us to go; but Ferrars he kept for half an hour; and when Ferrars came in to dinner I saw he’d been blubbing.
He explained to me after we’d gone to bed. He said: