The morning class was listless, for the weather remained at a great pitch of heat, and the only thing that any one thought of was the fixture with the M.C.C. which would begin at noon. Cleaver always assisted as umpire at this match, and so the deserted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the Big Schoolroom by themselves. In this great chamber—it was said that the roof-span was as wide as any in England—Edwin dreamed away the morning, reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the boards on which the names of scholars were recorded: giants who had passed before him along the same corridors, and whose names were only memorable as those of heroes in a mythology, or more ponderably evident in reports of parliamentary debates and the scores of county cricket teams. Opposite him hung the board devoted to the winners of entrance scholarships. His own name was there. Edwin Ingleby . . . 1895. He remembered the day when it had almost embarrassed him with its fresh gold lettering. Now the leaf had toned down, and the name had sunk into obscurity beneath a dozen others. So the passage of fleet time was measured on these tables. In a few more years nobody who didn’t take the trouble would read his name. Even those of the batch before him were half-buried in obscurity. One other name arrested him: G. H. Giles. He knew nothing of Giles except that this brilliant beginning had been followed by disaster. The name of Giles appeared on no other board; for the term before Edwin came to St. Luke’s Giles had been expelled from the school. Edwin didn’t know what he had been expelled for; but the circumstance, remembered, afflicted him with a kind of awe. “It might happen so easily,” he thought. Why, if he hadn’t lied to the Head the day before he might have been expelled himself, and years afterwards some one sitting in his place would stare at the name of Ingleby with the selfsame awe. The voice of Mr. Leeming, stuck fast where Edwin had left him a year before, in the Stuart period, recalled him. “We will pass over the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charles the Second’s reign. Unfortunately, he was a thoroughly bad man, and his court . . .” Edwin heard no more, but he heard another sound peculiar to the Big Schoolroom on Saturday mornings: the measured steps of the school sergeant plodding down the long stone corridor which led to the folding doors. On Saturday morning the form-masters presented their weekly reports to the Head, and boys whose names came badly out of the ordeal were summoned to the office to be lectured, to be put on the sort of probation known as “Satisfecit,” or even to be caned.