"What are you doing?" I shouted, but Jack went on washing, so I shut up asking questions.
In a few minutes he came back into the room, and stood in front of me with a candle held up in front of his face. His lips were swollen, and there was a great cut, which kept on bleeding, over his right eyebrow.
"I look nice, don't I?" he said. "I've had a fight with a man who told me that his name was Briggs."
By degrees I got the whole tale out of him, but it is no fun trying to talk when a great coal-heaving man has hit you in the mouth with his fist. Jack had come home by himself, and as he was turning out of the High by B.N.C. Tom Briggs, who had followed him all the way, charged into him. Then there was a little conversation, and Briggs called Jack something especially horrid, and gave him a shove at the same time, so Jack hit him on the nose. After this there was a rough-and-tumble, until that most inquisitive man Carter and his bull-dogs came up and caught Jack. What happened to Briggs he did not know.
"You mustn't tell Carter that you were at Bunny's," I said, after I had blamed myself, until Jack was tired, for having persuaded him to start to that wretched meeting.
"That's a trifle compared with this," he answered, and he was right.
There was a huge row, and it ended in Jack being sent down for the rest of the term. A man, who had been lurking about somewhere, said that he saw Jack hit Briggs first, which was true as far as it went, but hard luck on Jack all the same.
Bunny wanted to have a procession to the station when Jack went away, but he absolutely refused to have any fuss whatever, and altogether took his luck like a sportsman.
If I had only waited for him, or never bothered him to go out at all, this would never have happened, and tired as I have often been of myself, I do not think I have ever felt more utterly wretched than I was during the last few days of that term when I, who ought really to have been in Jack's place, was still in Oxford, and Jack was with his very angry people.
I went to the Warden and told him that Jack would never have gone out of college that night if it hadn't been for me, but all he said was that the Proctor had taken a serious view of the case, and he would not have anybody in the college brawling in the streets. I also wrote to Jack's people and told them that the whole thing was my fault, but his father's answer was very short and disagreeable; he had entirely lost his temper.