, and
Frampton could hardly be serious when he talked of doing so. But on
Saturday, if it was fine, and they felt in the humour--well, they would
see about it.

With which condescending resolution they returned to their loafings and
novels and secret cigarettes, and tried to forget all about Mr
Frampton.

But Mr Frampton had no idea of being forgotten. He had the
schoolmaster's virtue of enthusiasm, but he lacked the schoolmaster's
virtue of patience. He hated the dry-rot like poison, and could not
rest till he had ripped up every board and rafter that harboured it.

Any ordinary reformer would have been satisfied with the week's work he
had already accomplished. But Mr Frampton added yet another blow at
the very heart of the dry-rot before the week was out.

On the day before the football match Bolsover was staggered, and, so to
speak, struck all of a heap by the announcement that in future the
school tuck-shop would be closed until after the dinner hour!

Fellows stared at one another with a sickly, incredulous smile when they
first heard the grim announcement and wondered whether, after all, the
new head-master _was_ an escaped lunatic. A few gifted with more
presence of mind than others bethought them of visiting the shop and of
dispelling the hideous nightmare by optical demonstration.

Alas! the shutters were up. Mother Partridge was not at the receipt of
custom, but instead, written in the bold, square hand of Mr Frampton
himself, there confronted them the truculent notice, "The shop will for
the future be open only before breakfast and after dinner."

"Brutal!" gasped Farfield, as he read it. "Does he mean to starve us as
well as drown us?"

"Hard lines for poor old Mother Partridge," suggested Scarfe.

This cry took. There was somehow a lurking sense of shame which made it
difficult for Bolsover to rise in arms on account of the injury done to
itself. Money had been wasted, appetites had been lost, digestions had
been ruined in that shop, and they knew it.

If you had put the question to any one of the boys who crowded down,
hungry after their bath, to breakfast on the day of the football match,
he would have told you that Frampton was as great a brute as ever, and
that it was a big shame to make fellows play whether they liked it or
not. For all that, he would tell you, _he_ was going to play, much as
he hated it, to avoid a row. And if you had pressed him further he
would have confided