me as
though I were something unreal. He had taken off his coat and rolled
his shirt sleeves up. He had on bright yellow boots and a hateful
necktie. You, indeed! I would as soon believe," she concluded, "that
you had fallen, to-day from a flying-machine."

"Let us believe that," he begged, earnestly. "Why not? Indeed, in a
sense it is true. I am cut adrift from my kind, a stroller through
life, a vagabond without any definite place or people. I am trying to
teach myself the simplest forms of philosophy. To-day the sky is so
blue and the wind blows from the west and the sun is just hot enough
to draw the perfume from the gorse and the heather. Come and walk with
me over the moors. We will race the shadows, for surely we can move
quicker than those fleecy little morsels of clouds!"

"Certainly not," she retorted, with a firmness which was suspiciously
emphasized. "I couldn't think of walking anywhere with a person whom
I didn't know! And besides, I have to go and make tea in a few
minutes."

He looked over her shoulder and sighed. A trim parlor maid was busy
arranging a small table under the cedar tree.

"Tea!" he murmured. "It is unfortunate."

"Not at all!" she replied sharply. "If you'd behave like a reasonable
person for five minutes, I might ask you to stay."

"A little instruction?" he pleaded. "I am really quite apt. My
apparent stupidity is only misleading."

"You may be, as you say, a vagabond and an outcast, and all that sort
of thing, but this is a conventional English home," the girl with the
blue eyes declared, "and I am a perfectly well-behaved young woman with
an absent-minded but strict parent. I could not think of asking any one
to tea of whose very name I was ignorant."

He pointed to the afternoon paper which lay at her feet.

"I sign myself there 'A Passer-by.' My real name is Burton. Until
lately I was an auctioneer's clerk. Now I am a drifter--what you will."

"You wrote those impressions of St. James's Park at dawn?" she asked
eagerly.

"I did."

She smiled a smile of relief.

"Of course I knew that you were a reasonable person," she pronounced.
"Why couldn't you have said so at once? Come along to tea."

"Willingly," he replied, rising to his feet. "Is this your father
coming across the lawn?"

She nodded.

"He's rather a dear. Do you know anything about Assyria?"

"Not a scrap."

"That's a pity," she regretted. "Come. Father, this is Mr. Burton.
He is very hot and he is