"Why, that person was abominable!" she declared. "He stared at 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."