“Ah,” said the figure indistinctly. Or it might have been “Oh!”
“Come to my study t’morrow morning at ten,” the head-master said sharply. “Silly ass, Marlay.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thus, it was all over bar the shouting. And there was very little of that, in the head-master’s study at ten o’clock the next morning.
“Well, what did you do it for?” was fired at Ivor as he came in. Ivor had the grace to be very white in the face. The head-master, fierce little man that he was, always fired his questions like that, briskly, brusquely, indomitably. He always spoke as though he was going to swear, which indeed he sometimes did; but always just at the right moment and about the right thing, always knowing when to be a man, when a head-master, and when a Canon; which made him very efficient and popular as all three.
“Well, Marlay?”
“If you want the absolute truth, sir——”
“Get on, man.”
“I was frightfully bored, sir,” Ivor said heavily; and never was boredom more cruelly punished than by its owner’s white face and by the silence that followed its confession. The Little Man stared at him, and he tapped the edge of the table with a paper-knife. Then he jumped up.
“You go, of course,” he said.