was left with an almost hysterical sense of the preposterousness of the world in which out of nothing, a misconstruction, a whole mental fabric could be builded beneath the weight of which a normal, ordinary, respectable, hard-working, conscientious man could be crushed. And yet he did not feel at all crushed, but only rather excited and uplifted with, from some mysterious source, a new accretion of strength. "I see the force of your argument," he said to his chief. "I see the inevitability of the course you have taken. The story, even with my innocence, is too amusing for the dignity of an ancient foundation and our honorable profession of pedagogy."--He enjoyed this use of rhetoric as a relief to his feelings, for he was torn between tragedy and comedy, tears and laughter--"To oblige the Lord Mayor, the governors, and yourself, I will accept the generous offer of the Chief Constable. Good-bye. I hope you will not forget to mention Panoukian tomorrow." The Head Master pondered this for some moments and then held out his hand. Old Mole looked through him and walked on. He had not gone twenty yards when he began to chuckle, to gulp, to blink, and then to laugh. He laughed out loud, went on laughing, thumped in the air with his fist. Suddenly the laughter died in him and he thought: "Twenty-five years! That's a large slice out of a man's life. Ended--in what? Begun--in what? To show--what is there? Ended in one sleepy, generous impulse leading to disaster. Twenty-five years, slumbered away, in an ancient and honorable profession, in teaching awkward, conceited, and, for the most part, grubby little boys things which they looked forward to forgetting as soon as they passed out into the world." And he had taken pride in it, pride in a possession which chance and the muddle-headed excitability of men could in a short space of time demolish, pride in the thought that he was half remembered by some hundreds of the citizens of that huge, roaring city from whose turmoil and gross energy he had lived secluded. He looked back, and the years stretched before him tranquil and monotonous and foolish. He totted up the amount of money that he had drawn out of Thrigsby during those years and set against it what he had given--the use of himself, the unintelligent, mechanical use of himself. He turned from this unpleasant contemplation to the future. That was even more appalling. Within twenty-four hours he had to perform the definite act of disappearing from the scene. Beyond that lay nothing. To what place in the world could he disappear? He had one brother, a Chancery barrister and a pompous ass. They dined together once a year and quarreled. . . . His only sister was married to a curate, had an enormous family and small means. All his relations lived in a church atmosphere--his father had been a parson in Lincolnshire--and they distrusted him because of his avowed love for Lucretius and Voltaire. Certainly they would be no sort of help in time of trouble. .