"He hadn't the last time I talked to him about it."
"He must look sharp," said Loring. "Four times next week, or—he knows the penalty."
Mayhew nodded, and the subject was dropped for a week. Then I was summoned to a Monitors' Meeting. Loring, as ever, lay full length on the floor in front of his fire, Tom Dainton sprawled in the arm-chair, little Draycott swung his legs in their carefully creased trousers from one corner of the table, and I occupied the only vacant seat in the window.
"About this fellow O'Rane," yawned Loring from the hearthrug. "He's cut Little End all this week, so I propose to have him up and inquire the reason. If none's forthcoming, he must die the death. All agreed?"
He dragged himself to his feet, picked his cane from the wastepaper basket and dealt two echoing blows to the lower panels of the door. The studies in Matheson's were in a line, opening out of the long Hall where the juniors lived and worked and ragged and had their lockers. Two kicks on a study door meant that the monitor inside required a fag, and it was the business of the junior in Hall at that moment—"lag of Hall," as he was called—to eliminate time and space in answering the summons. Two blows of a cane indicated a potential execution. A sudden silence descended on Hall; two light feet jumped over a form, there was a hurried knocking, and a breathless, scared junior thrust his head in at the door.
"Send O'Rane here."
Through the hushed Hall a sigh of relief went up from the forty odd boys who were not O'Rane. The name was shouted by one after another, like the summons of a witness in Court. "O'Rane! O'Rane! Spitfire, you're wanted! What's it for, Spitfire? Hurry up, they're muck sick if you keep 'em waiting!" Mayhew's voice sympathetically murmured, "Bad luck, old man!" Then there came a second knock at the door.
Loring stood with his back to the fire, bending his cane into an arc round one knee.
"Have you been down to Little End this week?" he asked.