That night, Brinker comes into their room with several other boys and takes Gene and Finny off to the Assembly Hall, where he has gathered an audience and a panel of judges for an inquiry into the cause of Finny’s accident. Brinker asks Finny to explain what happened on the tree in his own words, and Finny reluctantly says he lost his balance and fell. Boys from the audience ask what caused him to fall and inquire about Gene’s whereabouts at the time. Finny says he thinks Gene was at the bottom of the tree, and Gene agrees that he was, but that he cannot remember exactly what happened. Finny remembers he had suggested a double jump and that they were climbing the tree together, and Gene struggles to defend the discrepancy in his story. Brinker laments that Leper is not there, as he could have remembered everyone’s exact position. Finny quietly announces that he saw Leper slip into Dr. Carhart’s office that morning, and the two boys are sent to find him. After a while, they return with Leper, who seems falsely confident and composed. They ask him what happened, and he says he saw two people on the tree silhouetted against the sun, and one of them shook the other one off the branch. Brinker asks Leper to name the people and say who moved first, but Leper replies he will not incriminate himself and does not want to do anything for anyone else anymore. As Brinker tries to bring Leper back to his senses, Finny rises and says he does not care what happened and then rushes out of the room in tears. They hear him run down the hall and fall down the marble stairs. This chapter focuses on the shattering of Finny’s illusions. The first fallen illusion is his belief in the persistence of peace (and the 1944 Olympics), followed by his more important illusory faith in the unshaken strength of his friendship with Gene. Significantly, Brinker has a hand in dispelling both of these. Finny’s illusions comfort Gene as well as Finny by giving him a refuge from the confusions of the world around him and his own character. After coming from seeing Leper, Gene immediately seeks out Finny, who believes only in the classical, Olympian conflict of athletics, in which victory goes to the strongest in body and heart. Significantly, he finds Finny playing at the edge of the Devon woods, which he imagines as the beginning of a great American wilderness. The snowball fight shows Finny’s wildness and competitiveness as he creates teams and then shifts loyalties abruptly. This transformation from chaos to order and back seems to be a common pattern in Finny’s schemes, and Gene will later allude to it in telling him why he is not cut out for war. Another transformation has occurred in the boys, so that when Finny calls the snowball fight a Hitler Youth outing, everyone laughs, whereas before they wanted only to play the role of good American soldiers-in-training and would have taken offense at a joke like this. A small section in this chapter is singled out with page breaks for greater attention in which Finny says his leg is getting stronger and Gene seems more thankful for this than Finny himself. The atmosphere in Gene and Finny’s room is significant, as the walls bear pictures representing fallen illusions: Finny has a picture of Roosevelt and Churchill, whom he calls the two most important fat old men in the hoax; and Gene has pictures of a plantation that he used to pass off as his own heritage but now has outgrown as he has begun to get a sense of his true identity. Gene is tired of having to mislead people. Brinker closes quickly on the truth about Leper, while Finny insists one last time on his belief that there is no war. After he hears about Leper and Brinker points out that he cannot go to war, Finny reveals with a rare ironic remark that his delusions about the war were an entirely self-conscious invention, a defense mechanism to shield him from the reality of not being able to participate in world events because of his leg. After this, he and Gene no longer have the crutch of their private peace and hopes for the 1944 Olympics. They reminisce fondly about their former delusions at one point and try to recapture something of their protective quality in retrospect, but Finny stresses that above all else, they must believe in each other (