“Here, Severn! Severn! What’s the matter with you?” gasped Slegge excitedly. “I haven’t done anything. Are you going mad?”
“You have, you blackguard!” cried Glyn, forcing the fellow back till he had him up against the garden-fence. “You have always hated me ever since I licked you, and like the coward you are you stooped to write that dirty, ill-spelt, abominable letter to make the Doctor think I had stolen Singh’s belt.”
“Oh, I don’t know what you mean,” whined Slegge. “Let go, will you?”
“No!” cried Glyn, raising his other hand to catch Slegge by the wrist. “Not till I’ve made you do what the Doctor asked for—taken you to his room and made you confess.”
“Confess? I haven’t got anything to confess. You are mad, and I don’t know what you mean,” cried Slegge, whose face was now white. “Let go, or I’ll call for help.”
“Do,” cried Glyn, “and I’ll expose you before everybody. You coward! Why, a baby could have seen through your miserable sham, ill-spelt letter, with the words all slanting the wrong way.”
“I don’t know what letter you mean. Has the Doctor been showing you the letter he was talking about?”
“No,” said Glyn mockingly, as he read in the troubled face before him that he was quite right. “But I have read it all the same, on the piece of blotting-paper that you used to dry what you had written—the sheet of blotting-paper that was put ready on my desk so that if it were found it might seem that I was the writer.”
“That I wrote?” said Slegge, with a forced laugh. “That you wrote, you mean, before you sent it. I don’t know what for, unless you wanted people to think that it was done by some one who didn’t like you. What do you mean by accusing me?”
“Because you are not so clever as you thought. Come on here to the class-room. I have been there this morning, and laid the blotting-paper by the side of one of your exercises on your desk; and, clever as you thought yourself, the Doctor will see at a glance that some of the letters, in spite of the way you wrote them, could only have been written by you.” And here he took a piece of paper out—a piece that he had torn from Slegge’s exercise-book—and laid beside it the unfolded blotting-paper.