"Thanks so much," he murmured. "You are going to do all the things we do, I suppose?" "Of course," she said, joyfully; "everything--and a lot you don't do because you are too lazy!" "I suppose you will leave us the right to propose?" "I'll share it with you," she said, and they both laughed. "Oh, my dear Fred," he said, "I must come back to the chestnut: you are our superiors, and we like you to be. I suppose that's because we are born hunters and are keen for the unattainable. We won't bag the game if it roosts on our fists." "Well," s he reassured him, springing to her feet, "_I'm_ not going to roost on your fist; don't be afraid!" "Try me," he said, under his breath. But she did not hear him. "Come, Zippy, we must go home," she said, and extended a careless hand to Arthur Weston, as if to help him rise. He pretended not to see it. ("The next thing will be a wheeled chair!" he told himself, hotly.) CHAPTER XIII On the first of June Frederica transferred herself and a somewhat reluctant Flora from Payton Street to Lakeville. "Flora thinks her beau won't go out there to see her," Miss Carter explained. "Nonsense!" Fred said. "If he wants to see her he'll come, and if he doesn't want to see her she'd better find it out now." But she was not entirely unsympathetic, and told Flora there would be a piano in the cottage so that the music lessons could be continued--which raised the cloud a little. A day or two later Mrs. Holmes called at No. 15 to bid Mrs. Payton good-by for the summer, and the next week the Childses dropped in, in the evening, for the same purpose. They all made their annual remark: "How _can_ you stay in town in the hot weather?" And Mrs. Payton made her annual reply: "I hate summer resorts. I'm much more comfortable in my own house." Nobody asked the real question, "How can you stay here with Morty?" And Mrs. Payton never gave the real explanation: "My life is perfectly empty except for Mortimore; that's why I stay with him." When they had all left town Mrs. Payton, who changed her under-flannels and packed up her winter blankets by the calendar, put the stuffed furniture into linen covers, and told Anne to keep the shutters bowed all over the house--except in the ell; the sun was never shut out of the room with the iron bars over the windows. Then summer sleepiness took possession of the household. No one disturbed the quiet except when, occasionally, Arthur Weston, bored and kindly, dropped in to ask for a cup of tea. He told himself once, after a dull hour of drinking very hot tea and listening to plaintive details of Freddy's behavior, that he was going to leave directions in his will to have inscribed upon his tombstone, "_He seen his duty, and he done it._" It occurred to him that he would not wait for the tombstone to suggest that same duty to Frederica....