Ted stalked straight into the summer house, with his head in the air and his mind filled with high-souled resolutions. Any one less occupied with his own reflections would have seen that Katharine was sitting with an absent look in her eyes, while the book she held in her hand was open at the index-page. But Ted only saw in her the woman he had just sworn within him to respect; and he took the book reverently out of her hand, and sat down, also just behind her, on the end of the basket chair. It was the same basket chair. "Kitty, I say," he began, clearing his throat, "I've come to tell you something." Katharine glanced at his solemn face, and looked away again. She wished he had not sat just there. "It must have something to do with a funeral, then," she said, with a flippancy that would have aroused the suspicions of a more observant person. But Ted was still absorbed in his high-souled resolutions, and her abstraction failed to make any impression on him. "No, it hasn't," he rejoined gloomily. "I wish it had! I shouldn't mind being dead, not I! It would cure this hump, anyhow. Perhaps some one would be sorry, then; don't know who would, though! _She_'d only complain of the expense of burying me." "Poor old man, who has been bullying you now?" asked Katharine, in a dreamy voice that she strove to make interested. "Has _she_ been doing anything fresh?" "Has she, that's all! She's been doing something to some purpose, this time. Got me a beastly job, in a beastly city place; a pound a week; soap, or wholesale clothing, or something poor. Says I ought to be thankful to get anything. Thankful indeed! _She_ never shows a spark of gratitude for her bally seven hundred a year, I know." "Oh, Ted! every one is going away. What shall I do?" The words escaped her involuntarily. But he was still too full of his own troubles to notice anything except that she seemed distressed; and this, of course, was only natural. "I knew you'd be cut up," he said, kicking savagely at the leg of the chair. "You're the only chap who cares; and you'll forget when I've been gone a week. Oh, yes, you will! I ought never to have been born. They're sure to be rank outsiders, too; and I can stand anything sooner than bounders. It's too beastly caddish for words, and I'd like to kill him for his rotten advice. What does he know about anything, a played-out chap like that?" Ted's conversation was apt to become involved when he was agitated; but on this occasion Katharine made no attempt to unravel it. "Poor Ted," she murmured tonelessly, and continued to think about something else. "I don't know why you are so cut up about it. I'm such a rotten ass, and you're so infernally smart! I haven't any right to expect you to care a hang about me; I won't even ask you to write to me, when I'm gone," cried Ted, making desperate efforts to keep his high-souled resolutions. "It's a rotten, caddish world, and I'm the rottenest fool in it."