“I can’t help it,” he confessed. “I’m—I’m drunk.” Hard Roe threw out his hand and clutched him by the shoulder. “Stand up! You are _my son_.” Roe made a belated attempt to look apologetic. The Head laid his other hand alongside the first and shook him savagely. “Where have you been? Why are you like this?” He was speaking through clenched teeth and his arms were trembling with the force of his passion. But there came only an unresponsive silence. If there is one particular phase of drunkenness at which one may best appreciate the beastliness of it, then it is at that moment when one perceives the subject looking around him as if in search of a convenient spot in which to be sick. The Head removed his hands and they fell weightily to his sides. He began to jerk words incredulously at his son, as if his power of speech was somehow dislocated. “You understand—you understand. You are the Headmaster’s son. You are captain of football. You came as an _example to them_. I——” His passion slowly subsided. He began to grow hard and isolated, impregnable. Once he heard a hurried scuffling upstairs as if someone were hiding away all traces of carousal and vanishing quickly from the scene. Now the whole house was very still. He had an implicit belief that even if the banisters were not lined with the heads of inquisitive boys, at least every member of the house was listening at an open door, and he knew that they would be wondering what Hard Roe would do at this, the crisis of his life. He knew that he must not hesitate. He gave his son a final shaking. “Have you no explanation at all?” he begged. “Have you nothing whatever to say to me?” The boy could find no proper answer. His eyes were closing sleepily. He had propped himself against the banisters. The final exhilaration that had sent him downstairs in that eccentric dance had deserted him, and a feeling of giddy biliousness had come in its place. He shook his head with a comical slantwise motion. Above the many conflicting emotions in his mind now the Head remembered his reputation. Throughout his life, whenever he had been in doubt, facing two roads, he had taken always that way which he felt he would not be expected to take. Now the unexpected had, in its turn, come upon him with a rush. Once again two ways lay open to him, and he knew now that the way which would be the unexpected way would be a way that was terribly hard, albeit absolutely just. He suddenly tilted up his chin. A glare of dour pugnacity had settled upon his features as if in token of decision. Then at last he spoke, and his voice was resolute and even. “There is one law in this school, and I show no favour. It was you that I brought here as an example to a school which knew no discipline. Now it is as an example that I shall have to send you away. You are expelled. To-morrow you leave this school in disgrace.” He stopped.