Chapter 625: Lovesickness Deep to the Bone (5)
Chapter 625: Chapter 625: Lovesickness Deep to the Bone (5)
This remark was met with a chorus of groans. Sheldon Caldwell said with a humorless smile, "Do you all think ten laps is too few? Let’s make it twenty, then. If you’re still not satisfied, we can add more. The sky’s the limit."
This time, there wasn’t even a groan. Other instructors were already directing the students to fall out and begin running.
The students were all regretting their decision. ’If we’d known we were going to be late, we shouldn’t have come down at all. We haven’t seen them punish anyone who didn’t show up.’
Someone protested loudly, "Instructor, this is unfair! There are still people upstairs who haven’t come down. Aren’t you going to do anything about them?"
As soon as the student finished speaking, his words resonated with many of his classmates, who all began to shout that it was unfair.
"At the start of this training, I told you that you are all comrades," Sheldon Caldwell’s icy voice rang out. "What is the most fundamental rule between comrades? It’s mutual trust. You don’t sell each other out. The students who just tattled can add another ten laps!"
The group of students was dumbfounded. Another ten laps meant thirty laps in total. Just moments ago, they had been mocking Susan Caldwell for being an idiot, running laps all by herself on the field. Well, look at them now—they were all idiots.
Sheldon Caldwell paid their reactions no mind and continued, "As for the students who didn’t come downstairs... how do you know they’re getting away with it?"
Just then, the students saw the dorm supervisors herding twenty or thirty students out of the dormitory building.
Vera Xavier’s sharp eyes spotted Susan Caldwell among them, as well as Crystal Quinn, the girl who had given her a hard time in the cafeteria earlier that day.
It only took Vera a moment of thought to understand. ’Fundamentally, Susan Caldwell inherited all of Rona Langdon’s "finest" qualities—greed, spite, vanity, and a love for leisure combined with a hatred for work.’
’Susan is just very good at putting on an act, so these traits aren’t always obvious. But they’re bone-deep, and in a situation like this, they easily give way to wishful thinking.’
’Sheldon Caldwell is her brother, after all. He’d already punished her once, so how could he possibly do it again? She must have been convinced that if Sheldon noticed she wasn’t there, he’d turn a blind eye.’
But what she hadn’t counted on was Sheldon having the dorm supervisors be the ones to round everyone up. No one could escape.
Before coming downstairs, she had tried everything—pleading, bribing—hoping the dorm supervisor would let her off the hook. But she had the bad luck of running into an incorruptible one, who promptly threw her out.
Susan Caldwell cared immensely about her reputation. Standing there like that, in front of so many people, she felt as if all the dignity she had maintained her entire life had been completely stripped away in just two days!
When she saw Vera Xavier in the crowd, a mocking look on her face, a storm of resentment brewed inside her, but she could only swallow it down.
Sheldon Caldwell hadn’t expected to see Susan in that group, either. A flash of anger appeared in his eyes. He had thought yesterday’s punishment would have taught her a lesson—that she couldn’t expect special treatment. But now it seemed his words hadn’t sunk in at all.
For some reason, Sheldon recalled what Vera Xavier had said the previous night. ’Is my sister really the type of person who’s two-faced?’
Sheldon’s surprise assembly tonight was originally just meant to shake the students up a bit and prepare them for the rest of their military training. He never expected this kind of incident.