Mr. Peace was not deceived by the boy's demureness.
"You want your ears boxed, you rogue!" he began; but at that moment in surged a torrent of rather frightened, very wrathful boys, who had been unprofitably spending the last half-minute in striving with penknives to force the lock of the already unfastened door.
However, the rudiments of school honour forbade their furnishing the master with an account of the occurrence, and they had to content themselves with breathing dark threats to those day-boys who crossed their path in the frantic rush to the book-room.
At sight of that rush a few of the milder spirits, such as Hughes and Frere, held their breath in dreadful foreboding, while the unconscious Mr. Peace roared:
"Now, then, how long do you mean to stay in there? The clock's on the strike. I mark every boy who isn't in his place when it stops! Do you hear me? Do you hear me, I say?"
"No," responded Cadbury, without thinking. Then, poking his head out, "What are we to do, sir, please? We can't find our books. Everything is changed. It's worse than a spring cleaning. Won't you look and see, sir?"
Before the invitation could be answered, there was an impatient knock of authority in the school-room—a rap of knuckles upon a desk—and everyone knew what that meant. Mr. West had entered, and was being kept waiting.
With what books they had managed to grab—some the right ones, many the wrong—the boarders slunk red-faced to their places, there to realize their luck, and perchance to discover their mistakes. Cadbury had no book at all. Green found himself hugging Toppin's Little Reader instead of Elementary Physics; and Hallett might make what use he could of the March Hare's English Conversation when he came to open it.
The pages of the masters' registers fairly bristled with black marks that unhappy morning. Grey was for bringing the enemy to book, and reporting his evil devices, but his elders quashed the proposal.