"But why?" Ward said.
"Exercise. Any room for another pig in the bottom of that cart?"
"Jump up, quick," Ward answered, "it is a quarter to twelve, and jolly lucky there is a moon or I should have missed you."
Bunny said that he was not going to hurry for any one, and wasted two or three valuable minutes before we got him safely into the cart. He was in an exceedingly bad temper, and it was only by dint of innumerable questions that we found that he had actually started to drive to Burtington and that something disastrous had happened on the journey. The exact nature of that disaster none of us ever discovered, but what Bunny wished us to believe was that he went to sleep and was driven into by a furniture van, and since he had been kind enough to start to Burtington we should have been a complete set of bounders if we had not suppressed Dennison when he said that no one was likely to believe such a tale as that. Anybody with a grain of decency could see that Bunny had been having a very bad time, and though we all thanked him tremendously when we got out at St. Cuthbert's, and told the driver to take him on to Christchurch as fast as he could, he just sat in the bottom of the cart and said nothing.
"I am afraid Bunny's ill," Ward said to me as soon as we got into college, and we blamed ourselves for not seeing him to "The House," though had we done so we could not have got back to St. Cuthbert's until a quarter-past twelve.
On the following morning Ward went round to see Bunny and found him drinking beer with his breakfast, which was a thing he never dared to do unless he felt aggressively well. Ward lunched with me and said that Bunny was all right except that his feelings were in a state of disorder.
"There is only one thing he is conceited about and that is his driving," Ward explained, "and last night he was driving a cob which a baby in arms could steer. Well, Bunny got upset, and is so ashamed of himself that he is angry with everybody else. He will be all right by dinner-time if he is left alone."