It was not very long ago; outside the confines of Cornwall he had been perhaps but vaguely recognized—perchance, perchance, the surest foundation of an extravagant record.... No matter, here we have our tradition, and let us make the best possible use of it. But this Marmadukery—a hideous word, but it serves—spread far beyond that stout originator. It was the spirit of the public school, the esprit de corps signified by the School song (it began “Procul in Cornubia,” and was violently shouted at stated intervals during the year), the splendid appeal “to our fathers who have played in these fields before us”—this was the cry that these banners and orations signified. Moffatt's was not a very old school, true—but shout enough about some founder or other and the smallest boy will have tears in his eyes and a proud swelling at his breast. Sir Marmaduke becomes medieval, mystic, “the great, good man” of history, and Moffatt's is “one of our good old schools. There's nothing like our public school system, you know—has its faults, of course; but tradition—that 's the Thing.” The stout figure of Sir Marmaduke hangs heavy over the day. Everyone feels it—everyone feels a great many other things as well, but Sir Marmaduke is the Thing. He was the Thing in some vague, blind way even to Mrs. Comber, so that he kept coming into the confused but happy conversation to which she treated anxious parents on the morning of this great day. Mothers arrived in great numbers on these occasions, and these three great days of the three terms were to Mrs. Comber the happiest and most confused events in the year. They marked an approaching freedom, they marked the immediate return of her own children, and they marked an amazing number of things that ought to be done at once, with the confusing feeling about Sir Marmaduke also in the air. But to-day she was happy; this horrible, terrible term was almost over. She had been so sure that something dreadful was going to happen, and nothing dreadful had happened, after all. They were safe—or almost safe—and her dear Isabel and Isabel's young man would be out of the place before they knew where they were. Then her own Freddie had last night, suddenly, before going to bed, taken her in his arms and kissed her as he had never kissed her before. Oh! things were going to be all right... they were escaping for a time at any rate. In the thought of the holidays, of a month's freedom, everything that had happened during the term was swiftly becoming faint and vague and distant. Now she was smiling in her sitting-room with four mothers about her, one very fat and one very thin, one in blue and one in gray, and they all sat very stiff in their chairs and listened to what she had to say.