As John raced away with his sheet of paper he heard Fane-Herbert muttering to himself: “Oh be damned to them! I’m last, any way. I’m not going to hurry any more.” They burst into the Gunroom, thrust their sheets of paper into Krame’s hands, and stood there trembling with exhaustion and pain. Dyce seemed to be on the verge of losing control. His face was working. They had fear that his nerves would yield, that he would break, as can even the strongest men, into ungovernable tears. The atmosphere was charged with a strange emotion--the emotion that, as it were a sudden fever, sometimes grips a mob, cutting it free from the restraints men impose upon themselves, casting it back into the primitive conditions of self-defence and self-assertion. If Dyce had given way, his collapse might well have been a signal for forgetfulness of the difference between senior and junior midshipmen, for a complete abandonment of control. Near him John could hear Driss--of all of them the youngest in appearance, the most clearly a simple-minded, high-spirited boy--saying over and over again to himself: “My God, I want to kill! I want to kill!” His fingers were twined among the tablecloth, as if thereby he held them in check. Now he was making odd, inarticulate sounds in his throat. John saw his face, and turned quickly from the flaming bitterness he read there. There were passions streaming through Driss, passions utterly foreign to his apparent nature, fierce desires, called up from God knew what animal depths, upon which it was not good to look. Last by thirty seconds, Fane-Herbert entered without signs of haste. And they put him over the table, and pulled out his shirt, and tried to flog the pride out of him. He did not move through it all, and when it was over, with his fine mouth set, he turned away from the faces grinning above the canes. “Fall in again!” Krame said. “Fall in, I say!” Evolution followed Evolution: the obstacle race in reverse order; an affair called Torpedoes, that consisted essentially in hurling the junior midshipmen’s bodies along the table against the for’ard bulkhead; and half a dozen others, the product of Krame’s ingenuity. Even the flame in Driss died down. There comes a time when resistance, even mental resistance, disappears. The limbs move as they are told. At ten o’clock a ship’s corporal tapped at the door and announced that it was time to close the Gunroom. “Last drinks,” said Krame, and rang the bell. “Warts fall out!”