“You all right, Benham?” cried Prothero, advancing into the road.
His eye examined the horse. It looked all right, if anything it was a trifle subdued; there was a little foam about its mouth, but not very much.
“Whoa!” said Benham, and the horse stopped. “Are you coming up, Prothero?”
Prothero clambered up beside him. “I was anxious,” he said.
They proceeded on their way to Cambridge.
“Something has happened to the wheel,” said Prothero, trying to be at his ease.
“Merely a splinter or so. And a spoke perhaps.”
Benham made a half-turn of the head. “It's a motor-bicycle.”
“Did you find it?” Prothero asked, after an interval.
“He ran into a motor-car--as I was passing. I was perhaps a little to blame. He asked me to bring his machine to Cambridge. He went on in the car.... It is all perfectly simple.”
Prothero glanced at the splinters in the wheel with a renewed interest.
“Did your wheel get into it?” he asked. Benham affected not to hear. He was evidently in no mood for story-telling.
“Why did you get down, Prothero?” he asked abruptly, with the note of suppressed anger thickening his voice.
Prothero became vividly red. “I don't know,” he said, after an interval.
“I DO,” said Benham, and they went on in a rich and active silence to Cambridge, and the bicycle repair shop in Bridge Street, and Trinity College. At the gate of Trinity Benham stopped, and conveyed rather by acts than words that Prothero was to descend. He got down meekly enough, although he felt that the return to Maltby's yard might have many points of interest. But the spirit had gone out of him.
For three days the two friends avoided each other, and then Prothero went to Benham's room. Benham was smoking cigarettes--Lady Marayne, in the first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited his pipe--and reading Webb's INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY. “Hello!” he said coldly, scarcely looking up, and continued to read that absorbing work.
“I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that damned dog-cart,” said Prothero, without any preface.
“It didn't matter in the least,” said Benham distantly.
“Oh! ROT,” said Prothero. “I behaved like a coward.”
“Benham,” said Prothero. “You are right about aristocracy, and I am wrong. I've been thinking about it night and day.”