"But why, Dennis?" I asked again. "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't," he replied, "but you've got your own troubles, and there's no point in worrying about me, in any case."
I begged him to tell me; I pleaded our old friendship, and the fact that I had taken him into my confidence in the various vicissitudes of my own love affair. It struck me at the time that it was I who should have been indebted to him for his patient sympathy and help; and here he was, poor old fellow, with a real, live trouble of his own, refusing to bother me with it.
"So you've just got to own up, old man," I finished.
"Oh, it's really nothing," said Dennis miserably. "I'm a crock, that's all. A useless hulk of unnecessary lumber."
"How, my dear chap?" I asked incredulously. Here was Dennis Burnham, who had put up a record for the mile in our school days, and lifted the public school's middle-weight pot, a champion swimmer, a massive young man of six-foot-two in his socks, calling himself a crock.
"You remember that summer we did the cruise from Southampton to Stranraer?"
"Heavens! yes," I exclaimed, "and we capsized the cutter in the Solway, and you were laid up in a farmhouse at Whithorn with rheumatic fever. Am I ever likely to forget it?"
"I'm not, anyway," said Dennis, ruefully. "That rheumatic fever left me with a weak heart. I strained it rowing up at Oxford, you remember, and that fever business put the last touches on it for all practical purposes."
"Are you sure, old man?" I asked. It seemed impossible that a great big chap like Dennis, the picture of health, should have anything seriously wrong with him.
"I'm dead sure, Ron; I wish I weren't. Not that it matters much, of course; but just now, when one has a chance to do something decent for one's Motherland and justify one's existence, it hits a bit hard."
"Is it serious?" I asked--"really serious?"
"Sufficient to bar me from joining you chaps, though I'll see if I can sneak past the doctor. You remember about three weeks ago we were to have played a foursome out at Hendon, and I didn't turn up? I said afterwards that I had been called out of town, and had quite forgotten to wire."
"Which was extremely unlike you," I interposed; "but go on."