knuckly inky hands. He had
rolled up his sleeves to show how Mr Gleeson would roll up his sleeves.
But Mr Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish
white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed. Perhaps he
pared them too like Lady Boyle. But they were terribly long and pointed
nails. So long and cruel they were, though the white fattish hands were
not cruel but gentle. And though he trembled with cold and fright to
think of the cruel long nails and of the high whistling sound of the cane
and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed
yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think
of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle. And he thought of
what Cecil Thunder had said: that Mr Gleeson would not flog Corrigan hard.
And Fleming had said he would not because it was best of his play not
to. But that was not why

A voice from far out on the playground cried:

--All in!

And other voices cried:

--All in! All in!

During the writing lesson he sat with his arms folded, listening to the
slow scraping of the pens. Mr Harford went to and fro making little
signs in red pencil and sometimes sitting beside the boy to show him
how to hold his pen. He had tried to spell out the headline for himself
though he knew already what it was for it was the last of the book.
ZEAL WITHOUT PRUDENCE IS LIKE A SHIP ADRIFT. But the lines of the
letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his
right eye tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out
the full curves of the capital.

But Mr Harford was very decent and never got into a wax. All the other
masters got into dreadful waxes. But why were they to suffer for what
fellows in the higher line did? Wells had said that they had drunk some
of the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been
found out who had done it by the smell. Perhaps they had stolen a
monstrance to run away with and sell it somewhere. That must have been
a terrible sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press
and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar
in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense
went up in clouds at both sides as the fellow swung the censer and
Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But God was
not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and
a