ou in
some of it," she promised, and laughed again at the way his face fell.

"I thought perhaps you were going to invite me in to help pop," he
suggested boldly.

"I understand you are engaged in the serious labour of collecting
material for a book on a most serious subject," she replied. "We
shouldn't dare to divert your mind; and besides I am told that Uncle
Calvin intends to introduce you formally to the family by inviting you
to dinner some evening next week. Do you think you ought to steal in by
coming to a corn-popping beforehand? You see now I can quite truthfully
say to Uncle Calvin that I don't yet know you, but after I had popped
corn with you--"

She paused, and he eagerly filled out the sentence: "You would know me?
I hope you would! Because, to tell the honest truth, literary research
is a bit new and difficult to me as yet, and any diversion--"

But she would not ask him to the corn-popping. And he was obliged to
finish his luncheon in short order because Roberta and Ted, plainly
anxious to begin the afternoon's program, made such short work of it
themselves. They bade him farewell at the door of the dining-room like a
pair of lads who could hardly wait to be ceremonious in their eagerness
to be off, and the last he saw of them they were running up the
staircase hand in hand like the comrades they were.

During his intensely stupid researches Richard Kendrick could hear
faintly in the distance the thud of the basket-ball and the rumble of
the bowls. But within the hour these tantalizing sounds ceased, and, in
the midst of the fiercest dash of rain against the library window-panes
that had yet occurred that day, he suddenly heard the bang of the
back-hall entrance-door. He jumped to his feet and ran to reconnoitre,
for the library looked out through big French windows upon the lawn
behind the house, and he knew that the pair of holiday makers would
pass.

There they were! What could the rain matter to them? Clad in high
hunting boots and gleaming yellow oilskin coats, and with hunters' caps
on their heads, they defied the weather. Anything prettier than
Roberta's face under that cap, with the rich yellow beneath her chin,
her face alight with laughter and good fellowship, Richard vowed to
himself he had never seen. He wanted to wave a farewell to them, but
they did not look up at his window, and he would not knock upon the
pane--like a sick schoolboy shut up in the nursery enviously watching
his pl