“I have just heard from Marchester,” he said. “You have done well, but you have not got a scholarship. There were six given, and you were eighth on the list. Don’t be discouraged; you have done well. But I am recommending your father to send you to Mr. Adams’s house, anyhow. It is more expensive than an in-boarder’s, and I wish you had got a scholarship, so as to begin helping in your own education. But I think you may consider that you will go to Mr. Adams’s next September.” The Head suddenly took his keys from his pocket, and rattled them in the lock of the drawer that held the canes. But he was doing it, so it seemed to David, in a sort of absence of mind and not to be thinking of what lay within. Then, leaving them there, he got up and rocked across to the fireplace, where he stood on the hearthrug, looking gigantic. He began a portentous, terror-breathing discourse. “David,” he said, “a few days ago you saw a schoolfellow publicly expelled. I saw you turn white; I saw your horror at the task that was forced on me. Now you are on the point of going out into the bigger life of a public school, and when you have been a week at Marchester you will look back on the time you have passed here as a sort of babyhood, and wonder whether it was you who smoked half a cigarette now and then, and cheeked Mr. Dutton, and put—er—put resurrection pie into envelopes and burned it.” (“Good Lord,” thought David. “Is it going to be a caning for sundries?”) Apparently it wasn’t. “But you will find,” continued the Head, “that there are worse things than smoking, and all the misdeeds you may or may not have been punished for, and you will find out that there are even worse things than stealing, and that many quite good chaps, as you would say, don’t think there is any harm in them. Do you know what I mean?” David looked up in quite genuine bewilderment. “No, sir,” he said. “Thank God for it, then,” said the Head. Then he moved across the room to his cabinet of cigars, and broke his own rule, for he took one out and lit it and smoked it in silence for a moment in the sacred presence of one of the boys. Then he turned to David again. “You don’t understand me now,” he said, “but you will. And when you do understand, try to remember for my sake, if that is anything to you, or for your own sake, which certainly is, or for God’s sake, which is best of all, that there are worse things than stealing. Things that damn the soul, David. And now, forget all I have said till the time comes for you to remember it. You will know when it comes. And don’t listen to any arguments about it. There is no argument possible.” “Yes, sir,” said David blankly. He could not understand why it was the Head had thanked God; but there was no time for wonder, for instantly the Head’s whole gravity and seriousness vanished.