The question was not answered at once. I cannot explain how it was, but the figure of Radley stood very clearly before my mind's eye, and this helped me to speak the truth, though my voice broke a bit. "Yes." "Ah!" Everybody considered Banana-Skin to have elicited a damning admission. "Now," continued Stanley, his curiosity superseding his sense of what was relevant, "how many cuts did he give you?" "Ten." "Poor little beggar! Didn't that seem to you rather a lot?" I shrugged my shoulders. "Now answer the Coroner that," commanded Kepple-Goddard. "Yes," I replied. "H'm!" grunted Stanley. "How did you know where you could find your thousand lines so that you could tear them up?" "I don't know what you mean. _You're_ bluffing now." "Hallo!" cried Banana-Skin. "Didn't you hear him say '_You're_ bluffing now'? That shows that _he_ was bluffing before." "Oh, that's a bit _too_ clever!" objected Stanley. "Give the kid a chance." There's nothing like sympathy for provoking misery and starting tears, and, as Stanley uttered that sentence, I decided that God had gone over to the prefects, and I would very much like to cry. To drive back the tears I called to my aid all the callousness and sulkiness which I possess. My face was the portrait of a sulky schoolboy as Stanley continued: "Now, Ray, which door did you leave the dormitory by?" "I didn't leave it." "I say," suggested Kepple-Goddard, "couldn't we send Bickerton to ask all the boys who sleep in the same dormitory whether they saw him leave it?" "But they'd have been asleep, you ox!" put in Banana-Skin. "Not necessarily." "But it doesn't follow that, if they didn't see him leave the dormitory, he didn't do it," objected Banana-Skin, the self-constituted prosecuting counsel, who didn't want to see his case fall to the ground. "Not quite. But if they _did_ see him, it proves him a liar and pretty well shows that he did." "There's more sense in Kepple's idea than one would expect," gave Stanley as his decision. "Dash away, Bicky, and find out." So Bickerton--or shall I call him Mercury, the messenger of the gods?--went, and I remained. It was no matter to me what news he brought back. I stood there, in the lions' den, and counted the cracks in the ceiling. I counted, also, the number of corners that the room possessed, and remembered how these same prefects had often (as when gods disport themselves) tried to make Doe and me stand in them for what they termed "unmitigated cheek"; how, giggling, we would fight them and kick them till they surrounded us and held us with our faces to the wall; and how we would call them all the rude names we could think of till they stuffed handkerchiefs in our mouths as a gag. One of their favourite pastimes had been to do Doe's hair, which they darkened with their wet brushes. It was usually a difficult business, as Doe would treat the whole operation in a disorderly spirit and declare that it tickled.