xt half-hour was for Rudd very hell of very hell. His
existence just now was not very pleasant. If he had been good at footer
all his domestic failings would have been forgiven him. But he was not;
he loathed the game, though at times he would have given anything to be
of some use. Strangely enough, at Oxford he found people respected his
brains, and no one hated him because he could not drop goals from the
twenty-five. Life is full of compensations.

Lovelace and Tester were both supreme actors. That night in the
dormitory they were full of the subject. After lights out, they kept the
whole place in a roar of laughter. Bradford joined in a bit, but he was
still nervous; visions rose up before him of an officer passing down the
ranks, suddenly seizing him, and saying: "This is the man." It was
hardly a ravishing thought; but it was useless to go back on a lie.
Tester realised this. As Ferguson came through he called out:

"I say, Ferguson, you know you'd better go up to the Chief and tell him
you did it."

Ferguson was, like the Boy Scout, always prepared.

"My good man, you don't surely imagine I am so devoid of good feeling
and have such a hazy conception of the higher life as not to inform the
Headmaster. I have just returned from breaking the news to him. He took
it quite well on the whole. It was a touching scene. I nearly wept."

Betteridge then arose, and gave an imitation of a Rogers' sermon.

"Well, Ferguson, I must own that I am sorry to lose you. I would give
much to retain you here. But _dis aliter visum_: you must go. You are
expelled. Between the Scylla of over-elation and the Charybdis of
despair you have a long time steered the bark of the School House. But
one failing wipes away many virtues. And we must not discriminate
between the doer and the deed, the actor and the action, the sinner and
the sin. The same punishment for all. But in that paradisal state where
suns sink not nor flowers fade, there will be a sweet reunion."

It was pure Rogers. The dormitory rocked with laughter. Tester began to
give his impressions of what the officer must have looked like. There
was a heated argument as to whether he was a parson. Mansell thought
not.

"A fellow who knows his Bible well would not be shocked with a little
swearing. I bet some of the bits in Genesis and Samuel are hotter than
anything the blighter said. It was probably some dotard who reads
Keats."

This seemed a sound piece of reasoning.