Toby laid a hand upon his shoulder.

“I met him outside just now,” said he. “I knew something was wrong. He was white with rage. He could hardly speak. But he says you’re to have the push—that’s all.”

There was absolute silence. With lovable tact, Henry Hope had taken the two boys with him out of the room as soon as he saw that Toby had something private to say. Terence stood against the mantelpiece and stared first at one and then at the other, and Rouse just stood before Toby and looked and looked and looked till he could see nothing at all but a foolish house of cards that had only come into being in the morning, and that now, at the end of the day, lay in a tumbled litter before his eyes.

CHAPTER V
BREAKERS AHEAD

The first significance of it all steadied Rouse in precisely one second, but for the reality of it to make its real impression needed time, and in the silence that followed the truth began to tell upon him.

In the whole history of Harley a Rugger captain elected by the school had never been turned down by the Headmaster. It would be a lasting disgrace. In some way that he did not yet understand he had let down the school. Moreover Rouse had an ideal, and the ideal was not only to be a great fullback, but to be, in the immediate future, a captain worthy to lead the team that Harley was going to have this year. To be told that he was not fit to captain any kind of team at all was no less surprising than having a bottle broken over his head. If it were true, then he might just as well be expelled.

He found himself wondering whether, if this came to pass, fellows would think he were just such another as Slade, who had been captain of cricket when he himself was a junior and whom the Grey Man had sacked. At least Slade had had a chance. To be judged in three days by a man who had never seen him before in his life did not give him a dog’s chance. It seemed pretty incredible that any fellow could be condemned like that, but that the fellow in question should be himself was very nearly unthinkable.

To Toby it was not unthinkable. If he had judged Dr Roe aright the new Head was a man whose first opinion was his last, and who, rather than have to confess himself in the wrong, would stick to a bad judgment against all argument, upholding it through thick and thin to the end. It was clear that he believed in impressing those under him with swift and irrevocable decisions, thereby instilling into them discipline of a kind that made those who had to be judged by him afraid to take their chance, and which consequently kept them on good behaviour.

There was another reason, too, why he would be a very difficult man to quarrel with. He was new to the school, and he was the type of man who would always be able to defeat those who really loved Harley by making the whole school and the school’s good reputation suffer for the misdeeds of any one individual. Something of this foreboding must have shown in Toby’s face, and Rouse saw it. At last he spoke.

“What is it that’s gone wrong, sir?” said he. “Does he really think I’d be a dud as a captain—or is it that he just takes me for a general waster? What is it makes him think it, any way? Surely it’s not just because I bumped into him with a table?... I would have apologised, as a matter of fact, only as I say I thought it was the man who comes to wind up the clocks, and he’s such a disagreeable old bogey that I didn’t trouble.... He ought to have looked where he was going. A man’s got no right to shoot out of the wall just as you’re going by with furniture.”