So he said, ‘What’s up, Dentist, old man?’ quite kindly and like a perfect knight, though, of course, he was annoyed with Denny. It is sickening when people turn pale in the middle of a game and everything is spoiled, and you have to go home, and tell the spoiler how sorry you are that he is knocked up, and pretend not to mind about the game being spoiled.
Denny said, ‘Nothing’, but Oswald knew better.
Then Alice said, ‘Let’s rest a bit, Oswald, it IS hot.’
‘Sir Oswald, if you please, Plain Pilgrim,’ returned her brother dignifiedly. ‘Remember I’m a knight.’
So then we sat down and had lunch, and Denny looked better. We played adverbs, and twenty questions, and apprenticing your son, for a bit in the shade, and then Dicky said it was time to set sail if we meant to make the port of Canterbury that night. Of course, pilgrims reck not of ports, but Dicky never does play the game thoughtfully.
We went on. I believe we should have got to Canterbury all right and quite early, only Denny got paler and paler, and presently Oswald saw, beyond any doubt, that he was beginning to walk lame.
‘Shoes hurt you, Dentist?’ he said, still with kind striving cheerfulness.
‘Not much—it’s all right,’ returned the other.
So on we went—but we were all a bit tired now—and the sun was hotter and hotter; the clouds had gone away. We had to begin to sing to keep up our spirits. We sang ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘John Brown’s Body’, which is grand to march to, and a lot of others. We were just starting on ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching’, when Denny stopped short. He stood first on one foot and then on the other, and suddenly screwed up his face and put his knuckles in his eyes and sat down on a heap of stones by the roadside. When we pulled his hands down he was actually crying. The author does not wish to say it is babyish to cry.
‘Whatever is up?’ we all asked, and Daisy and Dora petted him to get him to say, but he only went on howling, and said it was nothing, only would we go on and leave him, and call for him as we came back.