“What’s the matter?” Merry asked, in perplexity. “Why do you stare at me that way? Why, hang it! you don’t seem at all pleased to see me.”
He was surprised and hurt by Bart’s singular manner.
Hodge opened his lips to say something, but the words did not seem to come freely, and he stuck.
Merry came close and placed his hands on Bart’s shoulders, looking deep into the dark eyes of his comrade.
“Tell me why you meet me like this, old man!” he urged. “Have I done anything to cause it?”
“No.”
“Then why——”
“It’s nothing, Merriwell—nothing!” huskily muttered Bart. “Take a chair. I’ve been thinking, and I expect I’m in a deuced unsociable mood, but I’ll try to be decent.”
Frank did not sit down immediately on the invitation. Instead, he looked at Bart as if trying to read his very thoughts.
“You’re thin,” he said. “You have lost flesh and there are dark circles round your eyes. Are you ill?”