"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.
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