as the Garden of Eden. It's simply the most delightful place———"

It was at this moment, for same unaccountable reason, that the Colonel who had lost his hat suddenly proceeded to lose his head. Standing in that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow stately figure, he proceeded in the most traditional manner to offer the lady everything he possessed not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages; a half-humorous memory of which returned to him with the boomerang of bathos.

"When I think of the encumbrances on the estate———" he concluded gloomily. "Well; there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and a stupid man who has stuck in a rut of respectability and conventional ways."

"Very conventional," she said, "especially in his taste in hats."

"That was the exception, I'm afraid," he said earnestly. "You'd find those things very rare and most things very dull. I can't help having fallen in love with you; but for all that we are in different worlds; and you belong to a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences and our scruples meant."

"I suppose we are very rude," she said