No sooner had the form re-assembled in his hall next day than Haigh made them a set sarcastic speech on the subject of Jan's enormity. He might have seen at a glance that even outwardly the boy was already chastened; that his jacket and his hair were better brushed than they had been all the term, his boots properly laced, his tie neatly tied; that in a word there were more signs of self-respect. Haigh, however, preferred to look at his favourites at the top of the form, and merely to jerk the thumb of contempt towards his aversion at the bottom. He reminded them of his prophecy that Rutter would disgrace them all before the school, and the triumph of the true prophet seemed at least as great as his indignation at what had actually happened. Even he, however, had not foreseen the quality of the disgrace, or anticipated a fit of sulks in public. Yet for his own part he was not sorry that the Head Master, and Mr. Heriot and all the other masters and boys in the school, should have had an opportunity of seeing for themselves what they in that room had to put up with almost every day of the term. And the harangue concluded with a plain hint to the form to take the law into its own hands, and "knock the nonsense out of that sulky bumpkin, who has made us the laughing-stock of the place."
To all of which Jan listened without a trace of his old resentment, and then stood up in his place.
"I'm very sorry, sir," said he. "I apologise to you and the form."
Haigh looked unable to believe his eyes and ears. But he was not the man to revise judgment of a boy once labelled Poison in his mind. He could no longer fail to note the sudden improvement in Jan's looks and manner; all he could do was to put the worst construction upon it that occurred to him at the moment.
