nock your face through your head, if I didn't want
your services so badly. Are you at all stiff?"

"Yes, bored stiff with your conversation."

It was true that there had been no trace of the faintness which had
attacked me a year before. Had there been, I should have kept quiet
about it, for, in that time of excitement, I would willingly have
shortened my life by ten years, if I could have made certain of
securing the Cup for Bramhall. Only one thing marred this period of
my great ascendency; Radley, Bramhall's junior house-master, never
gave me a word of praise or flattery.

That wound to my self-love festered stingingly. I persisted in
letting my thoughts dwell on it. I would frame sentences with which
Radley would express his surprise at my transcendent powers, such
as: "Ray, you're a find for the house"; "I'm glad Bramhall possesses
you, and no other house"; "I don't think I've ever seen a faster
boy-swimmer"; "You're the best swimmer in the school by a long way."
I would turn any conversation with him on to the subject of the
race, and suffer a few seconds' acute suspense, while I waited for
his compliment. I would depreciate my own swimming to him, feeling
in my despair that a murmured contradiction would suffice: but this
method I gave up, owing to the horror I experienced lest he should
agree.

And, when he mercilessly refused to gratify me, I would wander
away and review all the occasions on which he had seen me swim,
recalling how I then acquitted myself; or I would laboriously
enumerate all the people who must have told him in high terms of
my performances. A growing annoyance with him pricked me into a
defiant determination, so that I reiterated to myself: "I'll do
it. I'll win it. I swear I will!"

Bramhall passed easily into the final. Erasmus, too, romped home in
their first and second rounds. So on the eve of the great race it
was known throughout Bramhall that the house must be prepared to
measure itself against Erasmus' famous four.

Betting showed Erasmus as firm favourites, the school critics
looking askance at Johnson, our weakest man. Only the Bramhallites
laid nervous half-crowns on the house, and hoped a mighty hope. That
excellent fellow, White, displayed his unfortunate features glowing
with an expression that was almost beautiful.

As the day of the race led me, steadily and without pity, to the
time of ordeal, I sickened so from nerves that I could scarcely
swallow food; and what I