"I did not feel myself called upon to make any difference," said Mr Jarman. "Apparently not. And on account of this affair, you say you expected Tempest would attempt to defy you last night?" Mr Jarman bit his lips and did not reply. Tempest resumed his questions with a coolness that surprised us. "You were smoking, I think, Mr Jarman?" "What if I was?" "Nothing, only I wanted the magistrate to know it. And you locked me into the gymnasium for half an hour till I kicked myself out. I say you had no right to do that. What did you do while I was inside?" "I walked up and down." "Did you try to stop me when I got out?" "No." "Why?" asked Tempest, with a sneer that made us all contrast his broad shoulders with the master's slouch. "I decided to deal with the matter to-day." "How did you see what I had done to the door in the dark?" "I saw by the light of a match." "You say it was two minutes after I left that the explosion took place, and immediately after you left?" "That's what I said." "And you were striking matches during the interval?" "Yes." "And yet you suggest that it was I who blew the place up?" "I say it was suspicious, knowing your frame of mind and the passion you were in at the time." "How could I blow up the place without explosives?" "There must have been some there already." "He didn't know anything about that! That was our affair, wasn't it, you chaps?" blurted out Trimble. "Rather," chimed in all of us. The sensation in the court at this announcement may be better imagined than described. The magistrate put on his glasses and stared at us. Mr Jarman looked startled. The doctor looked bewildered. "You see, it was this way," said Trimble, who had been working himself up to the point all through the previous cross-examination. "We had--" "Wait a moment, my boy," said the magistrate. But the witness was too eager to listen to the remark. "It was this way. We had a guy belonging to the Ph.C.C, you know, and he was chock-full of fireworks. We were keeping him for Guy Fawkes' Day, you know. You wouldn't have known he was Jarman (Mr Jarman, I mean), to look at him, but he was, and Sarah, being president, offered to look after him. It was too big to stick under the bed, so--" "So," continued I, "I thought the safest place to stick him would be in the lumber room under the gym.; and I never thought any one would be dropping matches through the grating on his touch-paper tongue. Tempest didn't know anything about it, and--" "You see," said Langrish, taking up the parable, "we meant to keep it dark, and only the Philosophers were in it; he had on Sarah's hat and boots, and a top-coat we found somewhere about. He'd have never gone off of himself, and he wouldn't have done any harm on the Fifth, when we should have hung and blown him up in the open. Tempest--"