"By the time you get this, I shall have cleared out. I may be an infernally rotten ass, but I won't let the best girl in the world marry me out of kindness, and that is all you were going to do. I tried to think you were a little keen on me a few weeks ago, but of course I was wrong. Don't mind me. I shall come up smiling again after a bit. It was just like my poorness to think I could ever marry any one so clever and spry as yourself. Of course you will buck up and marry some played-out literary chap, who will gas about books and things all day and make you happy. Good old Kit, it has been a mistake all along, hasn't it? When I come back, we will be chums again, won't we? I am off to Melbourne in the morning and shall travel about for a year, I think. You might write to me--the jolly sort of letters you used to write. Monty knows all my movements. Yours ever, Ted." The letter fell from her hand, and she turned and gazed blankly out of the window. The felt hat was no longer to be seen at the top of the hedge. CHAPTER XX High up in one of the houses on the shady side of the Rue Ruhmhorff, Katharine sat on her balcony and thought. Her reflections were of the desultory order begotten of early spring lethargy and early spring sunshine, relating to street cries innumerable and to the mingled scent of violets and asphalt in the air, to the children playing their perpetual game of hop-scotch on the white pavements, and to the artisan opposite who was mixing his salad by the open window with a naïve disregard for the public gaze. Her pupils were all in the Bois under the able supervision of the excellent Miss Smithson, and there was temporary calm in the three _étages_ that formed Mrs. Downing's Parisian establishment for the daughters of gentlemen. "Will he ever have done, I wonder?" speculated Katharine lazily. She was taking quite a languid interest in the progress of the salad, and smiled to herself when the man took off his blue blouse and attacked it afresh in his shirt sleeves. His wife joined him after a while, evidently, to judge from her emphatic gestures, with critical intent. But the man received her volley of suggestions with an expressive shrug of the shoulders, and they finally went off to their mid-day meal. "What pitiable jargon we talk, all the world over, about the triumph of mind over matter," murmured Katharine, yawning as she spoke. "And all the while matter goes on triumphing over mind on every conceivable occasion! It even gets into the street cries," she added with another yawn, as a flower vender came along the street below and sent up his minor refrain in unvarying repetition. "Des violettes pour embaumer la chambre," he chanted, "du cresson pour la santé du corps!"