The head-master threw the paper-knife on to the table with a clatter, and Ivor Marlay left school.
(It cost the night-prowler a pretty penny, that joke. For, a few days after he had prowled his last, the head-master and house-masters of Manton received each an anonymous box of Coronas. He really hadn’t the face to return the port in kind.)
3
Two hours later he was with Aunt Moira, in the house at Palace Green. He found her alone, erect in a high-backed Queen Anne chair in the bare and gloomy library in which she was wont to pass her afternoons reading, or writing letters. That large room had always awed Ivor: even as a child he had never wanted to play in it, for all that it was so limitless, the parquet floor so vast and shiny and unencumbered, the windows so wide and light with the fairy expanse of Kensington Gardens.
Aunt Moira watched his approach across the parquet floor, an uncomfortable kind of floor to traverse under raking eyes, without remark or sign. Aunt Moira was not given to showing surprise, not even at her nephew coming home alive in term-time.
That nephew approached, stood, grinned sheepishly, but spoke not: unless inarticulate mutterings of scarcely human intelligence be speech. It was Aunt Moira who spoke:—
“That horrible motor-cycle of yours makes a most disturbing noise, Ivor. I wonder the police let you. You might muffle it with something....”
(It was some years later that the Home Office bethought itself to pass a law against the open exhaust.)
And then Ivor explained how it had come about that he had been allowed to use the “red devil” in term-time. It was an idiotic tale to tell, and the telling took him some time, for he was very careful, trying to leave nothing out and to put as little as possible in. Aunt Moira did not interrupt once, she had always too much to say to interrupt; but she listened intently, and still more intently, and she tapped a foot on the floor.
When he had finished she used almost the identical words as the Canon Sidney Wentworth Carr, who was an old friend of hers—and with more weight, if that was possible. But Ivor, crushed already that day, was almost indifferent to this added burden. And though he tried, out of respect for Aunt Moira, to hide his indifference to the mere logic of the situation—for was this not, after all, an epoch in his life?—she must have perceived something of his peculiar nonchalance, for she suddenly cut short the expression of her deep disappointment with a very weary: