Sec.2

Within Radley’s spacious class-room some twenty of us took our way to our desks.  Radley mounted his low platform, and, resting his knuckles on his writing-table, gazed down upon us.  He was a man of over six feet, with the shoulders, chest, and waist of a forcing batsman.  His neck, perhaps, was a little too big, the fault of a powerful frame; and the wrist that came below his cuff was such that it made us wonder what was the size of his forearm.  His mouth was hard, and set above a squaring chin, so that you thought him relentless, till his grey eyes shook your judgment.

“Let me see,” he said, as he stood, looking down upon us, “you should come to me for both periods this morning.  Well, I shall probably be away all the second period.  You will come to this class-room as usual, and Herr Reinhardt will take you in French.”

“Oh, joy!” I muttered.  Boys whom Radley could not see flipped their fingers to express delight.  Others lifted up the lids of their desks, and behind these screens went through a pantomime that suggested pleasure at good news.  The fact was that the announcement that we were to have second period with the German, Reinhardt, was as good as promising us a holiday.  Nay, it was rather better; for, in an unexpected holiday, we might have been at a loss what to do, whereas under Reinhardt we had no doubt—­we played the fool.

“And now get on with your work,” concluded Radley.

We got on with it, knowing that it was only for a short time that we need work that morning.

It was writing work I know, for, after a while, I had a note surreptitiously passed to me between folded blotting-paper.  The note bore in Doe’s ambitiously ornate writing the alarming statement:  “I shall never like you so much after what you said this morning Yours Edgar Gray Doe.”  There was room for me to pen an answer, and in my great round characters I wrote:  “I never really meant anything and after you left I tried to be rude to Penny but he’d gone and will you still be my chum Yours S. Ray.” (My real name was Rupert, but I was sometimes nicknamed “Sonny Ray” from the sensational news, which had leaked out, that my mother so called me, and I took pleasure in signing myself “S.  Ray.”) My handsome apology was passed back to the offended party, and in due course the paper returned to me, bearing his reply:  “I don’t know We must talk it over, but don’t tell anyone Yours Edgar Gray Doe.”  That was the last sentence destined to be written on this human document, for Radley, without looking up from the exercise he was correcting, said quietly: 

“In the space of the last five minutes Doe has twice corresponded with Ray, and Ray has once replied to Doe.  Now both Ray and Doe will come up here with the letters.”

To the accompaniment of a titter or two, Ray and Doe came up, I trying to look defiantly indifferent to the fact that he was going to read my silly remarks, and Doe with his lips firmly together, and his fair hair the fairer for the blush upon his forehead and cheeks.