The door of the class-room opened, and the Head entered in rustling silk gown. He nodded to Maddox, who got up.
“All going well,” he said, “in Mr. Tovey’s absence?”
The form did not think so: but, unfortunately, the Head had not asked them.
“What are you doing with them, Maddox?” he said.
“Virgil lesson, sir,” he said. “We’ve had the prepared lesson, and I’ve set them a short unseen.”
“Very good practice,” said the Head. “And the marks for the seen translation were satisfactory?”
“Excellent. Please take the unseen translations over to my house after school, and I will look them over myself. It isn’t fair to give you all the work.”
The Head still lingered by Maddox’s desk, in a rather beastly fashion, and peered (he was a little short-sighted) at Maddox’s shorthand notes.
“And what are those cabalistic symbols?” he asked.
“Just notes I took in shorthand of the fellows’ translations, sir,” he answered.
“Ha! I shall like to compare these with the unseen. Write them out for me, Maddox, will you, and bring them over to me. And this?”
He took up the volume of Bohn’s translation which Maddox had been reading out of.
“It’s a Bohn, sir,” said Maddox. “I brought it in myself. I hadn’t time to learn up the lesson, and I thought I’d better have a crib by me.”
The Head, so thought the eager audience, looked rather stern for a moment. Then, quite naturally, he laughed.
“I shall confiscate that,” he said, looking pleasantly round. “Better practice for you, Maddox, to get up your lesson without one.”
He rustled out again, leaving uneasiness behind him. It had been rather sport to see Maddox’s crib taken from him, but behind that somewhat superficial pleasure there was a vague idea that dangerous things were getting into dangerous hands. Maddox had been bidden to supply the shorthand notes of the prepared translation, which would reveal the parallelisms between Mr. Bohn’s renderings and that of the Remove A. It would be a dreadful thing if the Head, in an abstracted moment, consulted Mr. Bohn also. Added to that there was the fact that the Head was going to look over the unseen work, and would no doubt be struck by the amazing contrast between that and the prepared lesson. It was almost too much to expect that he would credit the form with such extraordinary industry and taste as to have prepared their set piece so perfectly, and yet to be so lamentably wanting over an unseen. Such, at least, was the private meditation of most of Remove A, who wished severally and collectively that they had not been so brilliant over the first part of the lesson.