Ted looked towards the shrubbery, but lingered as though the invitation commended itself to him. "I think I'll have a pipe, if it's all the same to you. May I try that 'baccy of yours? Thanks, awfully!" They sat down on opposite sides of the little porch, and puffed away in silence. "You haven't been over much, lately," observed Paul presently. Ted glanced at him again, but was disarmed by his tone of friendliness. "No," he said. "At least, I was over once or twice last week, but I never got a look in with Kitty. I mean," he added hastily, "she was out, or something." "Ah!" said Paul indifferently; "that was unfortunate." "It was a howling nuisance," said Ted, his troubled look returning. "The truth is," he went on, feeling a desire for a confidant to be stronger than his distrust of Paul, "there's something I've been trying to tell Kit for a whole week, and for the life of me I can't get it out." "Going to make a fool of himself at the very start," thought Paul. "You see," continued Ted with an effort, "_she_ has been playing up so, lately." "Your mother?" questioned Paul. Ted nodded. "And now she's got me a confounded berth in some place in the city,--candles, or grocery, or something beastly. It's the poorest thing I ever heard. And I've got to start on Thursday, so I must leave home to-morrow. And Kitty doesn't know; that's the devil, you see." "I'm sorry," said Paul gravely. "Got it through some cousin of my father's," Ted went on in his aggrieved voice. "No one but a cousin of one's father ever hears of such rotten jobs. Said it would be the making of me, or some rot. I've heard that before; the men who never did a stroke of work themselves always talk that sort of cheapness. Have to be there at half-past eight in the morning, too, blow it!" "I'm sorry," said Paul again. He began to feel a vague interest in the boy as he sat opposite and stretched his long legs out to their full length, and jerked out his complaints with the brier between his teeth. "_She_ thinks it such great shakes, too; just because she won't have to keep me any longer. She ought never to have had a son like me; I wasn't meant for such beastly work. Why was I born? Why was I?" "The parents of the human animal are never selected," said Paul, for the sake of saying something. "I know I'm a fool,--_she's_ told me that often enough; so I don't expect to get anything awfully decent. But why did they educate me as a gentleman? They should have sent me to a board school, and then I should have been a bounder myself, and nothing would have mattered. What's the use of being a gentleman and a fool? That's what I am; and Kit's the only person in the world who doesn't make me feel it, bless her!"