"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
"The young man next door dropped Mary on the tar walk."
Catherwood clearly distinguished below the child's still frantic yells the grunt of the man who waited on the steps.
He was prompted to shout: "You lie; it was a drift," but a quick second thought restrained him.
As it was he took the stairs in the darkened hallway in three bounds and, rushing into his room, raved impotently. He kicked the legs of the Morris chair; he kicked the legs of the table; he kicked the backs of the books on the lowest shelf of the rack. He seized a pillow from the divan and proceeded to punch it violently, viciously. Then he flung himself face down upon the divan, and from the heart of the cushions came the muffled words:
"I wish the confounded kid had never been born!"
After some minutes he rolled over and for a space stared blankly at the ceiling. Then he rose, took a book from the rack and flinging himself into the Morris chair by the window opened it upon his knee.
It was a volume of the marvelous and enthralling adventures of the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes.
II
There are two kinds of hazing, as practiced by undergraduates at Ann Arbor; the plain and the ornamental.