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; 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 sinister isolation 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 feverish half-hour in 
looking for it, incidentally missing 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 obviously intent 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 cottage retreat in Surrey with a large mixture of 
bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden.  Unfortunately, though