“Where’s Newbury?” substituted Roger.
“Inside, next to the wall. Smithy got that arranged all right.”
“How does he come in?”
“How does he come into anything? Pulls wires and works his friends in the B.A.A. He’ll be on the referee’s launch in some official capacity, I’ll bet my head. I’m willing to let Newbury beat us in the trials, but we must make second place so as to get into the finals. I should like to save our strength as much as possible for the real thing. We ought to find Brookfield High and Boston Latin pretty easy; they are the others in our heat.”
“That’s right; our second could put it over either of them.”
“Well, take good care of yourself. Remember about eating and getting to bed. Good-by.”
Roger hung up the receiver and returned to the common room. The talk with Pete had put new life into him. Excited by the news and the prospect, he thought of his illness only as something which he had really left behind him, and which might be wholly disregarded. His mother’s instruction as to the examination of his heart he would not consider just now. There must be some way out of the dilemma. He must row, whatever happened; on that he was determined.
The dining-room doors opened just as he came down the corridor, and Roger went in with the first rush. Acting on the assumption that he was well, and hungry from a day’s fasting, he fell to greedily. Soup, roast, vegetables, pudding, fruit—he took them all, like any of the perpetually hollow boys who called the food at Adams’s “bum,” yet devoured it like cormorants. Mr. Adams was not at dinner; if he had been there he must have marked with uneasiness the feverish glitter in Roger’s eye and the abnormal convalescent’s appetite.
After dinner the company sallied forth to the playground, the younger lads to indulge in a screaming game of scrub, the older ones to sit round on the grass and watch Dunn trying to teach Cable to hold a pitched ball. Dunn had declared that Cable should learn, and Cable had declared that he couldn’t. In the contest Cable very clearly proved his case—to Dunn’s disgust and the infinite amusement of the onlookers. The sport terminated at half-past seven, when Jason, spying his tutor coming across from the street, drove a particularly vicious in-curve at the unfortunate Cable, who dodged the missile by an awkward sprawl, and trudged submissively after it to the distant elm trees.
Roger followed Dunn into the house. For the last fifteen minutes a sensation of approaching calamity had been growing upon him. The proud spirit of defiance with which he had declared himself well had forsaken him. His brain reeled under a dull, oppressive weight. The dinner which he had so recklessly devoured seemed like a mass of hardening cement in his stomach; his lips trembled, perspiration broke out on his forehead. Utterly wretched, he dragged himself upstairs to his room and sank into a chair by the open window.