“I say, Frank, what’s wrong with you?” said David.
Frank gave Adams’s letter to him.
“Read it,” he said.
David took it. It spoke of the letter written by Hughes to a boy in the house, a letter disgusting and conclusive. . . . Then it spoke of the disgrace Hughes had brought on himself, and the misery he had brought on his father and mother. He read it and gave it back to Frank.
“Well, I’m awfully sorry, just as you are,” he said; “but if fellows will be brutes——Old Adams seems no end cut up about it. But somehow, I’d ceased to be pals with Hughes. Where’s the Swinburne?”
But still Frank did not answer, and David knitted puzzled brows.
“What’s up?” he said.
Maddox turned over on to his back, and tilted his hat over his eyes till his face was invisible.
“I might have been Hughes,” he said.
Again the memory of what David always turned his face from came into his mind.