He is rather strong on the healthy boy and wants every boy to be keen. Fussy, pompous, and openly influenced in his official dealings with his form by his own private likes and dislikes, he makes himself unpopular in the school with his unfair treatment of those outside his own house. He owns a young bull terrier named Sampson (but familiarly known as Sammy). He rather fancies himself as a bowler, until Mike knocks him around the ground. The ambitious fiancée of Peter Burns and instigator of many of the events of "The Little Nugget", Cynthia is a tall, strikingly handsome girl, with clear white skin and pale gold hair, who carries herself magnificently. She also has a rather hard and cynical cast of countenance, and a cool sort of stylishness. Her simplicity of dress contrasts favourably with her mother's glittery tendencies, and she turns the head of many a man. Having started Burns on his dangerous path, Cynthia spends much of the duration of "The Little Nugget" offstage, on a yachting cruise in the Mediterranean, appearing only via correspondence, and we later only hear from her mother of her growing attachment to Lord Mountry. The mother of Cynthia, Mrs Drassilis is the daughter of a provincial solicitor and widow of the Hon. Hugo Drassilis, younger brother of the Earl of Westbourne, who appears in "The Little Nugget". Mrs Drassilis, on the death of her husband, was poorly treated by his family, who considered Hugo to have married beneath his class, and thus is forced to live on what for her are inadequate funds. This treatment, and the subsequent privations, spoil Mrs Drassilis' looks and her temper. When we meet her, she is a resident of London's Marlow Square, and is described as 'florid and overdressed'. Her character is perhaps the root of her daughter's cool and dangerous outlook, and is certainly part of the reason Peter Burns becomes engaged to Cynthia, mainly out of sympathy. A bank-robber of the old school, Mr Finglass was known as "Finky" to his contemporaries, and is remembered for his spectacular theft of around two million dollars in bonds from the New Asiatic Bank. Unfortunately, he was forced to flee the country without his haul; when he later passes away in Buenos Aires prior to the events of "Sam the Sudden", he leaves instructions for finding it divided between his old pals Thomas "Soapy" Molloy and Alexander "Chimp" Twist.