Then ensued a slight anticlimax, for the Head, though a very strong man in hand and arm, found it impossible to do as he had designed, and tear three hundred pages across and across. But the form generally, and Mr. Dutton in particular, were too stiff with horror to notice it. So, instead, the Head tore off section after section of the lightly sewn leaves, instead of tearing the pages, laid the dismembered carrion on the floor, and stamped on it, and then, with an indescribable ejaculation of disgust, threw the mutilated remains into the fireplace. “You are excused, Mr. Dutton,” he said, “from the rest of this lesson, which I will take myself; but you will do me the honour to call on me immediately after evensong this afternoon.” His fierce eye wandered from Mr. Dutton’s stricken face to David’s desk, where lay the inky dart. “You are engaged now, I see, in some inquiry,” he said. “A paper dart, I perceive, on Blaize’s desk. I will conduct the inquiry myself, and wish you a good afternoon.” He waited in tense silence till Mr. Dutton had taken his hat and left the room. Then he turned to David. “Blaize, did you make that dart, or did you throw it?” he asked. An expression of despairing determination had come into David’s face. He was conscious also of a large ink-stain on his lips. “Neither, sir,” he said. “Then who made it?” said the Head. “And also, for I perceive the point is blunted, who threw it?” Dead silence on David’s part. “Do you know?” asked the Head. “Yes, sir,” said David. “And do you refuse to tell me? I am not here to be bullied, I may remind you.” David felt slightly sick, but he had swallowed a good deal of chewed pen-handle. “Do you refuse to tell me?” repeated the Head. “Yes, sir,” said David. Then came one of those strange calms in the middle of cyclones, which sometimes puzzled the boys. But their conjecture, a perfectly right one, was that the Head, in spite of questions like these, did not like “sneaking.” Anyhow, for a moment his fierceness faded, and he nodded at David, just as one pal might nod to another in sympathetic assent. “Quite right, my boy,” he said. Then he turned to the rest of the class, holding up the bedraggled weapon. “Name,” he said. The miserable Bags stood up, without speech. “Oh you, Crabtree,” said the awful voice. “And so Master Crabtree thinks that the calm and quiet of Sunday afternoon is made to give him leisure to forge these filthy weapons: that the paper you are given to write home on is designed to be desecrated to these foul usages, and the ink to supply filth to them. You will write out with the ink you have so strangely misused two hundred lines of Virgil in copper-plate hand, and eat your dinner at the pig-table, apart from your companions, for the next week.”