He stood back from the door with his hand pressing on the table.

It was almost a relief to him that the summons had come so soon--it would presently all be over.
"Come in," he said, and gave one look at the golden mist, at the stars, at the tender face of Aegidius.
The door was opened slowly with fumbling hands, and there stood there a large, fat, clumsy, shapeless creature, with a white face, a hooked nose, an open, foolish mouth.
The reaction was hysterical.

To expect a summons to death and public shame, to find--Bunning.

Bunning--that soft, blithering, emotional, religious, middle-class maniac--Bunning! "Soft-faced" Bunning, as he was called, was the man of Olva's year in whom the world at large found most entertainment.

The son of some country clergyman, kicked and battered through the slow, dreary years at some small Public School, he had come up to Saul's with an intense, burning desire to make a mark.