"Oh well, if you like to get out of the whole thing it has nothing to do with me," I said, and the thought suddenly struck me that if I really goaded Dennison into giving up his name I should feel a brute for the rest of my existence. What I wanted to do was to prove that Ward was worth about ten of him, but it is very uphill work trying to convince a man that he is only a fraction of the fellow he thinks himself, I have often seen people going sorrowfully away from tasks of that kind. "There is no question of getting out of it," Dennison said quite calmly, "because I have never been in it." "No question at all," Ward put in. "At any rate you arranged it," I retorted. "And the very deuce of a job it was," he replied. "Of course it was," Ward said, and though I imagined I was out of elbow-shot I got another blow which did nothing to improve my temper. "It's like this," I began, "Ward went to the Subby and said----" But Ward burst in with, "By Jove, that is about the tenth time that man Foster has fallen on the ball, and now I believe he's hurt." For quite two minutes Fred lay on the ground, and I forgot all about Dennison and the exasperating mood I was in. At last he got up and moved about in a dazed condition, while some people clapped and others, more enthusiastic than anxious, began to shout, "Now then, 'Varsity." The game went on again, but my desire to be nasty had vanished, and I found that I had moved away from Ward and Dennison. When I returned to them I found that my interrupted remark had created a greater disturbance than I had expected. Dennison was fuming like anything, and so far was he from thinking that Ward and I had a grievance against him that he was treating himself as a thoroughly injured man. "It is a pretty low down game," he was saying to Ward, when I came back, "for you to go and give your name up to the Subby and tell me nothing about it. What do you think everybody will be saying about me? Marten has been talking to me as if I was a pick-pocket, while you were standing there and thinking yourself a sort of tin hero. If you want to know what I think you are, my opinion is that you're a confounded fool, but since you have done this I must go and see the Subby when I get back to college." This is only an expurgated copy of what Dennison said, as a matter of fact he called Ward and me much worse names than a pick-pocket, and qualified them with adjectives too violent to be recorded. I looked blankly at Ward, who had his head down and looked thoroughly ashamed of himself. "It is one of the few times in my life," he said, "when I have tried to do the right thing, and it seems to have been all wrong."