“Yes, sir.”
The boy went back to his seat. The class had been listening intently. The master looked up and caught sight of my face.
“Why, Rank, you have turned quite pale.”
Everybody looked at me in surprise. The lack of friendliness between Lionel Holland and myself was generally known, and it certainly astonished them that I should have turned pale out of sympathy for him.
He came back to school in about a fortnight looking none the worse for his accident. He was as confident as before and as irritating to me as ever.
I heard him explaining the incident in the playground afterwards.
“I’ll swear,” he was saying, “that something caught me just above the ankle. I don’t see how I could possibly have tripped otherwise.”
“What could it have been?” asked Grainger, the boy who had been timing him.
“I can’t think, I am sure, but I’m certain something tripped me up all the same.”
“I expect you turned giddy,” said a member of the Lower Fourth.