"Not another row?" Jack Ward put in most inconsiderately.
"Fred never said anything about it till too late," I answered; "he kept the whole thing so dark."
"I knew before luncheon," Nina replied, as if she had settled me completely.
I managed to let Fred know that I wanted him to read the note, and having opened the Oxford "Mag" no one saw that he had got the letter inside the pages. For a minute I persuaded Jack steadfastly to take my ticket and he refused with determination. If it had not been that Nina was upset very easily, and Mrs. Faulkner had been known to have hysteria without giving any one a moment's notice, I would have brandished the note in their faces instead of standing first on one leg and then on the other and looking a most hopeless fool.
I did not know what to say next, when Fred put down the magazine and joined us by the window.
"If you can't well manage to come to-night," he said, "and it was most awfully stupid of me not to tell you at once that we were going, I am sure Ward will have this ticket," and he pulled it out of his pocket and simply made Jack take it.
"I don't really think I can go, though I will turn up if I can," I said, and Fred made the most of my promise and talked so much that before I had to say anything else I found that he had persuaded Mrs. Faulkner and Nina to go down to the river and watch Oriel rowing in the earlier division. I went with them as far as the college lodge and then I disappeared, for the note which I had received upset all my hopes of enjoying myself for the rest of the day.
The first part of it was from Owen, who said he was feeling dreadfully ill, but the second part was written by his landlady, and she seemed to be in a terrible temper. As far as I could make out Owen was very much worse and still refused to have a doctor. "He says," his landlady wrote, "that if I send for a physician he won't pay him and I was up last night five times and who is going to stand it cough he coughs something awful and what's going to happen I don't know I expect he's got typhoid fever or something horrible." She did not use any stops, but that might have been because she was in a hurry; clearly, however, she was very angry, and there was only one thing for me to do.
I went round to Lomax Street as fast as I could, and I had no sooner got inside the house then I heard Owen coughing. I found his landlady in the state her letter had suggested I should find her, she was infinitely more sorry for herself than she was for Owen, and since he was too ill for her to get any satisfaction from visiting her grievance upon him she started off upon me.
"You are his friend," she said as she met me in the passage, "and you ought to have been here before. I was just doing myself up before putting on my bonnet to go out and report this case."