never have been a boy.' Perhaps that is the meaning of the 'Never-

never Land.' I daresay you're right in your criticism, but I don't
agree with you about Bassington. He's a handful to deal with, as

anyone knows who has come in contact with him, but if one's hands
weren't full with a thousand and one other things I hold to my

opinion that he could be tamed."
And he went his way, having maintained a form-master's inalienable

privilege of being in the right.
* * * * *

In the prefects' room, Comus busied himself with the exact position
of a chair planted out in the middle of the floor.

"I think everything's ready," he said.
Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in the

Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected
Christian to an expectant tiger.

"The kid is due in two minutes," he said.
"He'd jolly well better not be late," said Comus.

Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations in
his earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the last

ounce the panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed victim,
probably at this moment hovering miserably outside the door. After

all, that was part of the fun of the thing, and most things have
their amusing side if one knows where to look for it.

There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in response to
a hearty friendly summons to "come in."

"I've come to be caned," he said breathlessly" target="_blank" title="ad.气喘吁吁地">breathlessly; adding by way of
identification, "my name's Chetrof."

"That's quite bad enough in itself," said Comus, "but there is
probably worse to follow. You are evidently keeping something back

from us."
"I missed a footer practice," said Lancelot

"Six," said Comus briefly, picking up his cane.
"I didn't see the notice on the board," hazarded Lancelot as a

forlorn hope.
"We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our charge is two

extra cuts. That will be eight. Get over."
And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinisterisolation in

the middle of the room. Never had an article of furniture seemed
more hateful in Lancelot's eyes. Comus could well remember the

time when a chair stuck in the middle of a room had seemed to him
the most horrible of manufactured things.

"Lend me a piece of chalk," he said to his brother prefect.
Lancelot ruefully recognised the truth of the chalk-line story.

Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which he
would have scorned to apply to a diagram of Euclid or a map of the

Russo-Persian frontier.
"Bend a little more forward," he said to the victim, "and much

tighter. Don't trouble to look pleasant, because I can't see your
face anyway. It may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going

to hurt you much more than it will hurt me."
There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was made

vividly aware of what a good cane can be made to do in really
efficient hands. At the second cut he projected himself hurriedly

off the chair.
"Now I've lost count," said Comus; "we shall have to begin all over

again. Kindly get back into the same position. If you get down
again before I've finished Rutley will hold you over and you'll get

a dozen."
Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the taste

of his executioner. He stayed there somehow or other while Comus
made eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots at the chalk

line.
"By the way," he said to his gasping and gulping victim when the

infliction was over, "you said Chetrof, didn't you? I believe I've
been asked to be kind to you. As a beginning you can clean out my

study this afternoon. Be awfully careful how you dust the old
china. If you break any don't come and tell me but just go and

drown yourself somewhere; it will save you from a worse fate."
"I don't know where your study is," said Lancelot between his

chokes.
"You'd better find it or I shall have to beat you, really hard this

time. Here, you'd better keep this chalk in your pocket, it's sure
to come in handy later on. Don't stop to thank me for all I've

done, it only embarrasses me."
As Comus hadn't got a study Lancelot spent a feverishhalf-hour in

looking for it, incidentallymissing another footer practice.
"Everything is very jolly here," wrote Lancelot to his sister

Emmeline. "The prefects can give you an awful hot time if they
like, but most of them are rather decent. Some are Beasts.

Bassington is a prefect though only a junior one. He is the Limit
as Beasts go. At least I think so."

Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in the
gaps for herself with the lavish splendour of feminine imagination.

Francesca's bridge went crashing into the abyss.
CHAPTER III

ON the evening of a certain November day, two years after the
events heretofore chronicled, Francesca Bassington steered her way

through the crowd that filled the rooms of her friend Serena
Golackly, bestowing nods of vague recognition as she went, but with

eyes that were obviouslyintent on focussing one particular figure.
Parliament had pulled its energies together for an Autumn Session,

and both political Parties were fairly well represented in the
throng. Serena had a harmless way of inviting a number of more or

less public men and women to her house, and hoping that if you left
them together long enough they would constitute a SALON. In

pursuance of the same instinct she planted the flower borders at
her week-end cottageretreat in Surrey with a large mixture of

bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden. Unfortunately, though
you may bring brilliant talkers into your home, you cannot always

make them talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you
cannot restrict the output of those starling-voiced dullards who

seem to have, on all subjects, so much to say that was well worth
leaving unsaid. One group that Francesca passed was discussing a

Spanish painter, who was forty-three, and had painted thousands of
square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom no one in London

had heard till a few months ago; now the starling-voices seemed
determined that one should hear of very little else. Three women

knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt that she must
go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures, another

had noticed that there were always pomegranates in his later
compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar knew what the

pomegranates "meant." "What I think so splendid about him," said a
stout lady in a loud challenging voice, "is the way he defies all

the conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions
stand for." "Ah, but have you noticed - " put in the man with the

atrocious collar, and Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering
dimly as she went, what people found so unsupportable in the

affliction of deafness. Her progress was impeded for a moment by a
couple engaged in earnest and voluble discussion of some

smouldering question of the day; a thin spectacled young man with
the receding forehead that so often denotes advanced opinions, was

talking to a spectacled young woman with a similar type of
forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair. It was her ambition in life

to be taken for a Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of
patient research in trying to find out exactly where you put the

tea-leaves in a samovar. She had once been introduced to a young
Jewess from Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week;

the experience, slight as it was, constituted the spectacled young
lady an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her

immediate set.
"Talk is helpful, talk is needful," the young man was saying, "but

what we have got to do is to lift the subject out of the furrow of
indisciplined talk and place it on the threshing-floor of practical

discussion."
The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to dash

in with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip of her
tongue.

"In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid