"I don't wonder you are sick," he returned. "I should be if any one had done to me what we did to you and Foster this afternoon. It looks pretty rotten on the face of it, and I am as sorry as blazes that you had to have a row with those men."
"I'm not sick about the row," I answered; "that would have been fun if they hadn't got Foster's name."
Ward lay back in his chair, and tried to blow rings of smoke from his cigarette.
"Then you are just angry because you think we ought to have come back," he said.
"No, I'm not," I replied, and I felt horribly uncomfortable.
He looked most thoroughly puzzled. "What on earth do you mean?" he asked.
I got up and walked about the room before I spoke. "It's this way," I began. "I wanted you and Foster to like each other, because he is the greatest friend I have, and I like you. And when I had been saying what a good fellow you were, you go and make a most infernal row in a pub on Sunday afternoon and then bolt. I saw you in that confounded cart, and I ought to have told Foster that I knew you were the fellow who bolted. But I didn't."
Ward sat staring in front of him, and did not speak for some time. "I don't think I could ever be friends with Foster," he said at last; "he hated me at sight; but it is deucedly good of you all the same. I will write him a note and tell him I was the man. I was going to do that, anyhow."
"You weren't the man," I asserted; "it was that little brute, Dennison."
"He doesn't count," Ward said.