The senior boys were going up for their prizes now and were cheered according to their popularity. The Cricket captain, an enormous fellow, had secured something for Mathematics, and the room burst into a tempest of applause as he moved heavily up to the platform. He seemed very pleased with it all, Mr. Perrin thought, and received his prize with a flushed face and a friendly smile, and yet he had always been one of the leading rebels in the school. How easily these people were subdued, with a book and a few pleasant words—fool! Mr. Perrin's breath came quicker as he watched the boy stumble back to his seat. Then, the prizes delivered, Mr. Moy-Thompson rose to say a few words. It had been very gratifying, he said, to all of them to have so distinguished a visitor as Sir Arthur Spalding amongst them that afternoon. It must have been difficult for Sir Arthur to have found time amongst so many engagements to come and spend an afternoon with them. (Cheers—Sir Arthur conveys a sense of hurry and confusion and looks at his shirt cuffs as though his engagements were written down there.) They on their part were greatly the gainers because there was no one in the room, however young, however inexperienced, who would not remember, as long as he lived, those words of encouragement and cheer. Indeed, it was not only for the winners of prizes that life was intended (here Mr. Moy-Thompson repeated many of Sir Arthur Spalding's remarks and the governors moved restlessly in their chairs), but (and here Mr. Moy-Thompson started on a new note) it might not be, perhaps, presumptuous of him to hope that it was not only for them that afternoon might have pleasant memories. For Sir Arthur Spalding also, he might hope, there would be times in the future when he would look back and remember that he had seen, for an instant at least, one of our British public schools in one of its happiest and most prosperous phases. He might flatter himself— “It 's all lies!” The voice cut into the quiet and solemnity of the occasion like a knife. To the small hoys of the First and Second Forms, tired already of the over-long ceremony, their eyes wandering restlessly about the room, there may perhaps have been no surprise. They had watched that strange master of theirs—“that old ass Pompous”—seen his edging from the wall into the center of the room, seen his eyes burning, his hands clenching and unclenching, his lips moving. To them that sudden cry, that sudden lifting of a fist as though he would strike the patriarch to his feet, could have come with no uncalculated emotion. But to the rest, to the governors heavily somnolent, to Sir Arthur Spalding plaintively desiring his tea, to Mrs. Moy-Thompson, to Mrs. Comber, the matrons, the staff, the rest of the school, it came driving through the place like a wind, “What? Who?...” They rose in their places, they uttered little cries, they stood on the forms, but no one stopped that voice—they were held, paralyzed.