"You are awfully kind." He lifted his dreary eyes and surveyed her absently, but with some gratitude. "I suppose I had best be going," he added suddenly, as if struck by the anti-climax of his position. "No, no; not unless you feel you must." Katherine put out her hand again and detained his rising. "I can't bear to think of you going out alone like that into the cold. Just wait. You are bruised. Get back your breath. I am not going to be tiresome." Lord Allan leaned back in the sofa with a long sigh, relapsing into the same half stunned silence, while Katherine moved about the tea-table, measuring out the tea from the caddy to the teapot, pouring on the boiling water, and pausing to wait for the tea to steep. Presently Lord Allan was startled by a proffered steaming cup. "Will you?" she said. "I made it for you. It is such a chilly evening." "Oh, how awfully kind of you," he started from his crushed recumbency of attitude, "but you know I really _can't!_" But at the grieved gentleness of Katherine's eyes he took the cup. "It is too awfully kind of you. I do feel abominably chilly." He gulped down the tea, and gave a half shame-faced smile as she took the cup for replenishment. "No, don't get up," she urged, as he made an effort to collect his courtesy; "let me wait on you," and she returned with a discreetly tempting plate of the thinnest bread and butter. She sat down beside him again, looking into the fire with kind, sad eyes as she stirred her tea. She asked him presently, in the same quietly gentle voice, some little question about the most recent debate in the House. Lord Allan had rather distinguished himself in that debate; it was on the crest of that wave of triumph that he had come to Hilda. From monosyllabic replies he was led on to a rather doleful recitation of his own prowess; it seemed that Katherine had followed it all in the newspapers, so tactfully intelligent were her comments. He found himself sipping his third cup of tea, enjoying in a dreary way the expounding of his favorite political theories to the quiet, purple-robed figure beside him. He remembered that Miss Archinard had always been interested in his career; she, of course, was the intellectual one, though Hilda's beauty sent a sharp stab of pain through him as he made the comparison; he appreciated now Miss Archinard's kindness and sympathy with a brotherly warmth of gratitude. When he at last rose to go, he was dejected; but no longer the crushed individual of an hour before. "You have been too good to a beaten man," he said, taking her hand.