renowned in the neighborhood chiefly for my
shabbiness and my carpet slippers."

Burton paused on the threshold and looked back. Edith was bending over
the table, collecting the loose sheets of manuscript. The sunlight had
turned her hair almost to the color of flame. Against the background of
the open window, her slim, delicate figure, clad in a fashionable mist
of lace and muslin, seemed to him like some wonderful piece of intensely
modern statuary. Between them the professor sat, with his arms still
folded, a benevolent yet pensive smile upon his lips.

CHAPTER XVI

ENTER MR. BOMFORD!

"I have decided," Edith remarked, stopping the swinging of the hammock
with her foot, "to write and ask Mr. Bomford to come and spend the
week-end here."

Burton shook his head.

"Please don't think of it," he begged. "It would completely upset me.
I should not be able to do another stroke of work."

"You and your work!" Edith murmured, looking down at him. "What about
me? What is the use of being engaged if I may not have my fiance come
and see me sometimes?"

"You don't want him," Burton declared, confidently.

"But I do," she insisted, "if only to stop your making love to me."

"I do not make love to you," he asserted. "I am in love with you.
There is a difference."

"But you ought not to be in love with me--you have a wife," she reminded
him.

"A wife who lives at Garden Green does not count," he assured her.
"Besides, it was the other fellow who married her. She isn't really my
wife at all. It would be most improper of me to pretend that she was."

"You are much too complicated a person to live in the same house with,"
she sighed. "I shall do as I said. I shall ask Mr. Bomford down for
the week-end."

"Then I shall go back to London," he pronounced, firmly.

A shadow fell across the grass.

"What's that--what's that?" the professor demanded, anxiously.

They both looked up quickly. The professor had just put in one of his
unexpected appearances. He had a habit of shuffling about in felt
slippers which were altogether inaudible.

"Miss Edith was speaking of asking a visitor--a Mr. Bomford--down for
the week-end," Burton explained suavely. "I somehow felt that I should
not like him. In any case, I have been here for a week and I really
ought--"

"Edith will do nothing of the sort," the professor declared, sharply.
"Do you hear that, Edith? No one is to be asked here at all. Mr.
Burton's convenience is