Moreover, Hickey's sensitive nature was shocked. He had always looked upon Pa Dater as an antagonist for whose sense of fair play he would have answered as for his own. And now to be accused thus with innuendo and veiled menace--then he could have faith in no master, not one in the whole faculty! And this grieved Hickey mightily as he went moodily along the halls. Now, the code of a schoolboy's ethics is a marvellously fashioned thing--and by that each master stands or falls. To be accused of an offence of which he is innocent means nothing, for it simply demonstrates the lower calibre of the master's intelligence. But to be suspected and accused on mere suspicion of something which he has just committed,--that is unpardonable, and in absolute violation of the laws of warfare, which decree that the struggle shall be one of wits, without recourse to the methods of the inquisition. Hickey, disillusionised and shocked, went glumly down the brownstone steps of Memorial and slowly about the green circle, resisting the shouted invitations to tarry under the nourishing apple trees. He felt in him an imperative need to strike back, to instantly break some rule of the tyranny that encompassed him. With this heroic intention he walked nonchalantly up the main street to the jigger-shop, which no underformer may enter until after four. As he approached the forbidden haunt, suddenly the figure of Mr. Lorenzo Blackstone Tapping, the young assistant housemaster at the Dickinson, more popularly known as "Tabby," rolled up on a bicycle. "Humph, Hicks!" said at once Mr. Tapping with a suspicious glance at the jigger-shop directly opposite, "how do you happen to be here out of hours?" "Please, sir," said Hickey glibly, "I've got a nail that's sticking into my foot. I was just going to Bill Orum's to get it fixed." "Humph!" Mr. Tapping gave him a searching look, hesitated and mounting his wheel continued, unconvinced. "He looked back," said Hickey wrathfully, peering through the misty windows of the cobbler's shop. Then smarting at the injury, he added, "He didn't believe me--the sneak!" It was a second reminder of the tyranny he lived under. He waited a moment, found the coast clear and flashed across to the jigger-shop. Half drugstore, half confectioner's, the jigger-shop was the property of Doctor Furnell, whose chief interest in life consisted in a devotion to the theory of the millennium, to the lengthy expounding of which an impoverished boy would sometimes listen in the vain hope of establishing a larger credit. On every-day occasions the shop was under the charge of "Al," a creature without heart or pity, who knew the exact financial status of each of the four hundred odd boys, even to the amount and date of his allowance. Al made no errors, his sympathies were deaf to the call, and he never (like the doctor), committed the mistake of returning too much change.