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 to be consulted before any one's." She yawned and made a face at Burton. "Very well, father," she replied meekly, "only I might just as well not be engaged at all." "Just as well!" the professor snapped. "Such rubbish!" Edith swung herself upright in the hammock, arranged her skirts, and faced her father indignantly. "How horrid of you!" she exclaimed. "You know that I only got engaged to please you, because you thought that Mr. Bomford would take more interest in publishing your books. If I can't ever have him here, I shall break it off. He expects to be asked--I am quite sure he does." The professor frowned impatiently.