use it was one
decidedly not to his taste.

Mr. Wain sat on for some minutes after his companion had left,
pondering over the news he had heard. Even now he clung to the idea
that Appleby had made some extraordinary mistake. Gradually he began
to convince himself of this. He had seen Wyatt actually in bed a
quarter of an hour before--not asleep, it was true, but apparently on
the verge of dropping off. And the bars across the window had looked
so solid.... Could Appleby have been dreaming? Something of the kind
might easily have happened. He had been working hard, and the night
was warm....

Then it occurred to him that he could easily prove or disprove the
truth of his colleague's statement by going to the dormitory and
seeing if Wyatt were there or not. If he had gone out, he would hardly
have returned yet.

He took a candle, and walked quietly upstairs.

Arrived at his step-son's dormitory, he turned the door-handle softly
and went in. The light of the candle fell on both beds. Mike was
there, asleep. He grunted, and turned over with his face to the wall
as the light shone on his eyes. But the other bed was empty. Appleby
had been right.

If further proof had been needed, one of the bars was missing from the
window. The moon shone in through the empty space.

The house-master sat down quietly on the vacant bed. He blew the
candle out, and waited there in the semi-darkness, thinking. For years
he and Wyatt had lived in a state of armed neutrality, broken by
various small encounters. Lately, by silent but mutual agreement, they
had kept out of each other's way as much as possible, and it had
become rare for the house-master to have to find fault officially with
his step-son. But there had never been anything even remotely
approaching friendship between them. Mr. Wain was not a man who
inspired affection readily, least of all in those many years younger
than himself. Nor did he easily grow fond of others. Wyatt he had
regarded, from the moment when the threads of their lives became
entangled, as a complete nuisance.

It was not, therefore, a sorrowful, so much as an exasperated, vigil
that he kept in the dormitory. There was nothing of the sorrowing
father about his frame of mind. He was the house-master about to deal
with a mutineer, and nothing else.

This breaking-out, he reflected wrathfully, was the last straw.
Wyatt's presence had been a nervous inconvenience to him for years.
The time had come to put