Sir Patrick took up the newspaper which he had brought in from the garden, and looked once more to see if the surgeon was attending to him.

No!  The surgeon’s attention was absorbed in his own subject.  There he was in the same position, with his mind still hard at work on something in Geoffrey which at once interested and puzzled it!  “That man,” he was thinking to himself, “has come here this morning after traveling from London all night.  Does any ordinary fatigue explain what I see in his face?  No!”

“Our little discussion in the garden,” resumed Sir Patrick, answering Blanche’s inquiring look as she bent over him, “began, my dear, in a paragraph here announcing Mr. Delamayn’s forthcoming appearance in a foot-race in the neighborhood of London.  I hold very unpopular opinions as to the athletic displays which are so much in vogue in England just now.  And it is possible that I may have expressed those opinions a little too strongly, in the heat of discussion, with gentlemen who are opposed to me—­I don’t doubt, conscientiously opposed—­on this question.”

A low groan of protest rose from One, Two, and Three, in return for the little compliment which Sir Patrick had paid to them.  “How about rowing and running ending in the Old Bailey and the gallows?  You said that, Sir—­you know you did!”

The two choral gentlemen looked at each other, and agreed with the prevalent sentiment.  “It came to that, I think, Smith.”  “Yes, Jones, it certainly came to that.”

The only two men who still cared nothing about it were Geoffrey and the surgeon.  There sat the first, stolidly neutral—­indifferent alike to the attack and the defense.  There stood the second, pursuing his investigation—­with the growing interest in it of a man who was beginning to see his way to the end.

“Hear my defense, gentlemen,” continued Sir Patrick, as courteously as ever.  “You belong, remember, to a nation which especially claims to practice the rules of fair play.  I must beg to remind you of what I said in the garden.  I started with a concession.  I admitted—­as every person of the smallest sense must admit—­that a man will, in the great majority of cases, be all the fitter for mental exercise if he wisely combines physical exercise along with it.  The whole question between the two is a question of proportion and degree, and my complaint of the present time is that the present time doesn’t see it.  Popular opinion in England seems to me to be, not only getting to consider the cultivation of the muscles as of equal importance with the cultivation of the mind, but to be actually extending—­in practice, if not in theory—­to the absurd and dangerous length of putting bodily training in the first place of importance, and mental training in the second.  To take a case in point:  I can discover no enthusiasm in the nation any thing like so genuine and any thing like so general as the enthusiasm excited by your University boat-race.