The sudden collapse into complete senility of that licensed old impostor, Mr Bradford, had made it possible for the new headmaster to make some changes in the staff and replace him by a young man, not long down from the University, and Colin Keith was the man. Mr Birkett, who had previously been headmaster of the preparatory school at Southbridge, had been offered the headmastership of the senior school only a year earlier. He was barely a middle-aged man himself, and his interviews with the school Governors were too fresh in his mind for him to feel anything but sympathy for the applicants who came before him trembling or blustering as the case might be, or with a complete sangfroid that betrayed their nervous condition even more precisely to the practised eye.