“He doesn’t know I am going; nobody knows but you.  I have been a curse to every one who has been kind to me, and I am going now where there will be nobody but strangers about me.  To leave Uncle George breaks my heart, but so does it break my heart to leave my precious mother and dear old Alec, who cries all the time and has now taken to his bed, I hear.”

She waited, but her name was not added to the list, nor did he raise his head.

“I deserve it all, I suspect,” he went on, “or it wouldn’t be sent to me; but it’s over now.  If I ever come back it will be when I am satisfied with myself; if I never come back, why then my former hard luck has followed me—­that’s all.  And now may I talk to you, Kate, as I used to do sometimes?” He straightened up, threw down his cane, and turned his shoulders so he could look her squarely in the eyes.  “If I say anything that offends you you can get up and walk away and I won’t follow you, nor will I add another word.  You may never see me again, and if it is not what I ought to say, you can forget it all when I am gone.  Kate!”—­he paused, and for a moment it was all he could do to control himself.  “What I want to tell you first is this—­that I haven’t had a happy day or hour since that night on the stairs in my father’s house.  Whether I was right or wrong I don’t know; what followed is what I couldn’t help, but that part I don’t regret, and if any one should behave to you as Willits did I would do it over again.  What I do regret is the pain it has caused you.  And now here comes this awful sorrow to Uncle George, and I am the cause of that too.”

She turned her face quickly, the color leaving her cheeks as if alarmed.  Had he been behaving badly again?  But he swept it away with his next sentence.

“You see, my father refused to pay any of the bills I owed and Uncle George paid them for me—­and I can’t have that go on a day longer—­certainly not now.”

Kate’s shoulders relaxed.  A sigh of relief spent itself; Harry was still an honest gentleman, whatever else he might have done!

“And now comes the worst of it, Kate.”  His voice sank almost to a whisper, as if even the birds should not hear this part of his confession:  “Yes—­the worst of it—­that I have had all this to suffer—­all this misery to endure—­all these insults of my father to bear without you!  Always, before, we have talked things out together; then you were shut away and I could only look up at your windows and rack my brain wondering where you were and what you were doing.  It’s all over now—­you love somebody else—­but I shall never love anybody else:  I can’t!  I don’t want to!  You are the last thing I kiss before I close my eyes; I shut them and kiss only the air—­but it is your lips I feel; and you are the first thing I open them upon when I wake.  It will always be so, Kate—­you are my body, my soul, and my life.  I shall never have you again, I know, but I shall have your memory, and that is sweeter and more precious to me than all else in the world!”