"Have you anything you wish to say, Fenn?" "I thought you might have something to say to me, sir." "I do not understand you, Fenn." "I thought you might wish to apologise for slanging me in front of the fags." It is wonderful what a difference the last straw will make in one's demeanour to a person. "Apologise! I think you forget whom it is you are speaking to." When a master makes this well-worn remark, the wise youth realises that the time has come to close the conversation. All Fenn's prudence, however, had gone to the four winds. "If you wanted to tell me I was not fit to be head of the house, you needn't have done it before a roomful of fags. How do you think I can keep order in the house if you do that sort of thing?" Mr Kay overcame his impulse to end the interview abruptly in order to put in a thrust. "You do not keep order in the house, Fenn," he said, acidly. "I do when I am not interfered with." "You will be good enough to say 'sir' when you speak to me, Fenn," said Mr Kay, thereby scoring another point. In the stress of the moment, Fenn had not noticed the omission. He was silenced. And before he could recover himself, Mr Kay was in his study, and there was a closed, forbidding door between them. And as he stared at it, it began slowly to dawn upon Fenn that he had not shown up to advantage in the recent interview. In a word, he had made a fool of himself. III THE FINAL HOUSE-MATCH Blackburn's took the field at three punctually on the following afternoon, to play out the last act of the final house-match. They were not without some small hope of victory, for curious things happen at cricket, especially in the fourth innings of a match. And runs are admitted to be easier saved than made. Yet seventy-nine seemed an absurdly small score to try and dismiss a team for, and in view of the fact that that team contained a batsman like Fenn, it seemed smaller still. But Jimmy Silver, resolutely as he had declared victory impossible to his intimate friends, was not the man to depress his team by letting it become generally known that he considered Blackburn's chances small. "You must work like niggers in the field," he said; "don't give away a run. Seventy-nine isn't much to make, but if we get Fenn out for a few, they won't come near it." He did not add that in his opinion Fenn would take very good care that he did not get out for a few. It was far more likely that he would make that seventy-nine off his own bat in a dozen overs. "You'd better begin, Kennedy," he continued, "from the top end. Place your men where you want 'em. I should have an extra man in the deep, if I were you. That's where Fenn kept putting them last innings. And you'll want a short leg, only for goodness sake keep them off the leg-side if you can. It's a safe four to Fenn every time if you don't. Look out, you chaps. Man in." Kay's first pair were coming down the pavilion steps.