Roderick sneered, though mostly at the ground. He picked a daisy, and plucked a petal off with a hint of teeth beneath the right side of his lip.

“He was born better,” he insisted, rubbing the petal to a rolled up wad between his fingers. “Taken before his time, by a selfish, conniving who-…” his eyes flicked up to Evelyn, recalling that girls fainted at naughty words, “-rrible person.”

Swept again into his own ocean of self-pity, Roderick frowned at her question.

“What?” he answered back, as though the letter drama and his place as righteous better were as obvious as the sky was blue.

Roderick stared for a moment. Looked to the door he had just walked her to, then to the ground they stood on, and then to her again with an uncomfortable dawning of realization. She was right.

That could not stand.

“Don’t be so arrogant. I was just going to the washroom.”

He stormed ahead, and then swerved down the hall.

It would have been a lot shorter to the washroom to go that direction from the garden.