THE UNDYING FIRE
§ 5
"Gentlemen!" Mr. Farr protested with a white perspiring face.
"I had no idea," ejaculated Mr. Dad, "I had no idea that things had gone so far."
Sir Eliphaz indicated by waving his hand that his associates might allay themselves; he recognised that the time had come for him to speak.
"It is deplorable," Sir Eliphaz began.
He put down his hands and gripped the seat of his chair as if to hold himself on to it very tightly, and he looked very hard at the horizon as if he were trying to decipher some remote inscription. "You have imported a tone into this discussion," he tried.
He got off at the third attempt. "It is an extremely painful thing to me, Mr. Huss, that to you, standing as you do on the very brink of the Great Chasm, it should be necessary to speak in any but the most cordial and helpful tones. But it is my duty, it is our duty, to hold firmly to those principles which have always guided us as governors of the Woldingstanton School. You speak, I must say it, with an extreme arrogance of an institution to which all of us here have in some measure contributed; you speak as though you, and you alone, were its creator and guide. You must pardon me, Mr. Huss, if I remind you of the facts, the eternal verities of the story. The school, sir, was founded in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, and many a good man guided its fortunes down to the time when an unfortunate—a diversion of its endowments led to its
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