“What do you mean?”
He became shy. “I hadn’t meant to tell you. It’s not quite for a lady.” For, like most men who are rather animal, he was intellectually a prude. “He says he can’t ever marry, owing to his foot. It wouldn’t be fair to posterity. His grandfather was crocked, his father too, and he’s as bad. He thinks that it’s hereditary, and may get worse next generation. He’s discussed it all over with other Undergrads. A bright lot they must be. He daren’t risk having any children. Hence the hundred quid.”
She stopped laughing. “Oh, little beast, if he said all that!”
He was encouraged to proceed. Hitherto he had not talked about their school days. Now he told her everything,—the “barley-sugar,” as he called it, the pins in chapel, and how one afternoon he had tied him head-downward on to a tree trunk and then ran away—of course only for a moment.
For this she scolded him well. But she had a thrill of joy when she thought of the weak boy in the clutches of the strong one.
V
Gerald died that afternoon. He was broken up in the football match. Rickie and Mr. Pembroke were on the ground when the accident took place. It was no good torturing him by a drive to the hospital, and he was merely carried to the little pavilion and laid upon the floor. A doctor came, and so did a clergyman, but it seemed better to leave him for the last few minutes with Agnes, who had ridden down on her bicycle.
It was a strange lamentable interview. The girl was so accustomed to health, that for a time she could not understand. It must be a joke that he chose to lie there in the dust, with a rug over him and his knees bent up towards his chin. His arms were as she knew them, and their admirable muscles showed clear and clean beneath the jersey. The face, too, though a little flushed, was uninjured: it must be some curious joke.
“Gerald, what have you been doing?”
He replied, “I can’t see you. It’s too dark.”