At ten o’clock,—Wolcott’s bedtime when in training,—Haydock lit a pipe and knocked on The Magnificent One’s door at the other end of the long corridor. His coming at that hour was such a matter of course, that the door had been left hospitably unlatched as usual.
“How was the rowing to-day?” he asked. The question, also, was a matter of course.
“Damned hard work!” Wolcott was leisurely undressing and dropping his clothes wherever he happened to be when they came off. “About ten racing starts, then down to the Basin and up to the Brighton abattoir and back. I’m tired.”
“And just a dash peevish, I believe.” Haydock sat down on the floor, and lit the shavings and kindling wood in the fireplace. Wolcott’s rooms were always as fresh and cold as the weather permitted.
“Oh, Ellis is such a God awful fool,—I’d break his face if he was bigger!” Wolcott looked at the fire a moment, and thoughtfully stroked one of his bare arms. “I got this, to-night.” He took a letter from the mantelpiece and dropped it into Haydock’s lap. Haydock read it while The Magnificent One got into his pyjamas before the fire. The letter had nothing whatever to do with Ellis. Not that Haydock supposed it had; logical sequence in any two of Wolcott’s remarks always surprised him. It was a tactfully worded appeal from Barrows, the Recording Secretary, telling, with simple realism that somehow or other stayed by one after the letter was back in its envelope, of a fine, keen, scholarly fellow in the sophomore class who had been found, literally starving, a stone’s throw from the College Yard.
“What do you think, Boy?” asked Wolcott, indifferently.
“I wonder who it is,” mused Haydock.
The Secretary’s omission of the man’s name hadn’t interested Wolcott in the least.
“Why didn’t he keep away, damn his soul?” he said.
“Well, he’s here,—that’s the main thing.”