Late on Thursday night, when the boys had all gone to their rooms after supper, Mr. Brandiston opened the drawer containing the packet of papers, to assure himself that, when he wanted the papers next morning, he would find them there. It struck him, rightly or wrongly, that they were not arranged in his ordinary exact manner. He took them out. He counted them again. The number was--one short. There had been fifty when he counted before; there were forty-nine now. He repeated the counting as many as three times, but always with the same result. One paper was missing. He looked into the drawer again, ransacked it thoroughly; but it contained nothing, except some few copies of old examination papers which had been left there casually. He unlocked the other drawers of the writing-table and searched them all. It was no good. Mr. Brandiston was in a quandary. Had he counted the number aright in the first instance? or had the printers, by mistake, sent only forty-nine? That was a possibility, but it was not improbable. He telegraphed early next morning to the firm of printers; the reply was that the number of papers sent had undoubtedly been fifty. It seemed clear, then, to Mr. Brandiston that some one must have come into his study during his absence and taken a paper out of the drawer. If so, it was presumably some one who was interested in learning the contents of the paper. That being his conclusion, his thoughts turned, naturally, to the two boys in his house who were members of the form to which the paper would be set. One of them was Gerald Eversley, the other a very good boy named Pomfret. Mr. Brandiston tried to recollect what had happened since the sealed packet of papers came into his hands. He remembered opening it and putting it into the drawer. He remembered, or he believed he remembered, that as he was putting the packet into the drawer, just before dinner, he was called away by a message from Mrs. Brandiston, who wanted to speak to him about the invitations to be sent out for a proposed party. He remembered, too, that between nine and ten o’clock on the Wednesday evening--the evening before this--he had gone out of his study for a few minutes, leaving the key of his writing-table in one of the drawers--not, indeed, in the drawer which contained the examination papers, but in another drawer on the opposite side of the table.