“So you’ve just got to own up, old man,” I finished.
“Oh, it’s really nothing,” said Dennis miserably. “I’m a crock, that’s all. A useless hulk of unnecessary lumber.”
“How, my dear chap?” I asked incredulously. Here was Dennis Burnham, who had put up a record for the mile in our school days, and lifted the public school’s middle-weight pot, a champion swimmer, a massive young man of six-foot-two in his socks, calling himself a crock.
“You remember that summer we did the cruise from Southampton to Stranraer?”
“Heavens! yes,” I exclaimed, “and we capsized the cutter in the Solway, and you were laid up in a farmhouse at Whithorn with rheumatic fever. Am I ever likely to forget it?”
“I’m not, anyway,” said Dennis, ruefully. “That rheumatic fever left me with a weak heart. I strained it rowing up at Oxford, you remember, and that fever business put the last touches on it for all practical purposes.”
“Are you sure, old man?” I asked. It seemed impossible that a great big chap like Dennis, the picture of health, should have anything seriously wrong with him.
“I’m dead sure, Ron; I wish I weren’t. Not that it matters much, of course; but just now, when one has a chance to do something decent for one’s Motherland and justify one’s existence, it hits a bit hard.”
“Is it serious?” I asked—“really serious?”