"Are you sure it wasn't a pin?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Are you in pain?"
"No, sir!"
"Am I to understand that..." But Philip's shoulders were shaking. Big tears rolled down his face. He hid his face in a dirty, frayed handkerchief. He heard Mr. Tomlinson and Miss Tibbet whispering overhead.
"The heat..." said one.
"Yes, I should think ... the heat...."
"You may go home, Philip Massel!" said Mr. Tomlinson. "Tell your mother to put you to bed at once. Say I told her she must keep you quiet. Don't come to school to-morrow if your head is aching.... And never let it happen again, young man! Understand that!"
Philip withdrew. A grin mingled maliciously with his tears.
A day or two later he was standing contemplatively against the playground wall during the interval, when he observed Harry Sewelson approaching. Sewelson, though he was about a year older, was in Philip's class. He lived in a draper's shop some minutes along Doomington Road. They had had no commerce hitherto. Philip made a new friend with extreme difficulty, and though he realized that there was a quality in Sewelson, a keenness in his grey eyes, which distinguished him from the rest, there was a garlic vulgarity about him, a strongly-flavoured bluster, which, he had learned from Reb Monash, was inseparable from Roumanian Jewry.