Mr. Wriford knocks on the study door, waits for the "One moment! One moment!" which is called to him and which gives a chinking of glass in suggestion of the fact that the Headmaster is putting away the medicine bottles, exhibition of which, as an Open-air Man, is so distasteful to him, and then enters to find the Open-air Man lying, as usual, on the sofa, amidst an air that appears to have escaped from beneath a cork rather than have come from the window. Mr. Wriford expresses the hope that he is better, Mr. Pennyquick the fear that he is not, and there is then brought forward the suggestion advanced by Abbot. "Thursday is half-term," says Mr. Wriford. "Do you think the boys might have a holiday? They've been working very well." "A whole holiday?" says Mr. Pennyquick doubtfully. Mr. Wriford knows perfectly well the reason for the dubiety in the Headmaster's voice. In these days he has taken the work of the school entirely out of Mr. Pennyquick's hands. Mr. Pennyquick no longer so much as reads roll-call and prayers. Abbot calls the roll and is mighty proud of the duty; Mr. Wriford takes prayers. Mr. Pennyquick perhaps twice in a week will tear himself from his sofa and his medicines and suddenly burst upon the schoolroom, patrol a few turns with loud and quite unnecessary "WORK UP'S!" and as suddenly discharge himself again to his study. The less frequently he appears, the more he shirks any scholastic duties with the neglect they entail of nursing his distressing ailments in the seclusion of his study. Thus it is the idea of having the boys on his hands for a complete day that gives this doubt to his tone when a whole holiday is projected, and Mr. Wriford, well aware of it, quickly reassures him on the point. "Well, I think they deserve a whole holiday," says Mr. Wriford. "Of course I'd come up just the same and look after--" "My dear fellow, a whole holiday by all means," Mr. Pennyquick breaks in. "By all means. Splendid! They deserve it. You're doing wonderfully with them, my dear fellow. My mother reports she has never known them so happy or so well-behaved. No ragging in the dormitories at night. Cold baths every morning at their own request. Good God, do you know I'm so much a cold bath man myself that I take one twice a day--twice a day winter and summer--when I'm fit. Clean and smart and quiet at meals. Perfect silence in the schoolroom. Keen, manly play in the field. Devoted to you. My dear fellow, you're wonderful. Whole holiday? Whole holiday by all means. I was going to suggest it myself." "Thursday, then," says Mr. Wriford. "They'll be delighted. I thought of playing cricket in the morning and then, if you agree, asking Mrs. Pennyquick if she could fix us up some lunch and tea things in hampers, and we'd go and picnic all the rest of the day at Penrington woods and bathe in the river and that kind of thing."