"You have the beans still, at any rate," the professor remarked, hopefully.
"We have the beans," Burton admitted, "but it is very awkward not knowing how long one's condition is going to last. I might go out without my beans one day, and find myself assailed by all manner of amazing inclinations."
"My dear young man," the professor said earnestly, "let me point out to you that this is a wonderful position in which you have been placed. You ought to be most proud and grateful. Any trifling inconveniences which may result should be, I venture to say, utterly ignored by you. Now come, let me ask you a question. Are you feeling absolutely your--how shall I call it--revised self to-day?"
"Absolutely, thank Heaven!" Burton declared, fervently.
The professor nodded his head. All the time his eyes were roving about Burton's person, as though he were longing to make a minute study of his anatomy.
"It would be most interesting," he said, "to trace the commencement of any change in your condition. I am here with a proposition, Mr. Burton. I appeal to you in the name of science as well as--er--hospitality. The change might come to you here while you are alone. There would be no one to remark upon it, no one to make those interesting and instructive notes which, in justice to the cause of progress, should be made by some competent person such as--forgive me--myself. I ask you, therefore, to pack up and return with us to Leagate. You shall have a study to yourself, my daughter will be only too pleased and proud to assist you in your work, and I have also a young female who comes to type-write for me, whose services you can entirely command. I trust that you will not hesitate, Mr. Burton. We are most anxious--indeed we are most anxious, are we not, Edith?--to have you come."
Burton turned his head and glanced toward the girl. She had raised her veil. Her eyes met his, met his question and evaded it. She studied the pattern of the carpet. When she looked up again, her cheeks were pink.
"Mr. Burton will be very welcome," she said.
There was a short silence in the room. The sunshine fell across the dusty room in a long, quivering shaft. Outside, the branches of an elm tree swinging in the wind cast a shadow across the floor. The professor, with folded arms, sat alert and expectant. Burton, pale and shrunken with the labors of the last ten days, looked out of his burning eyes at the girl. For a single moment she had raised her head, had met his fierce inquiry with a certain wistful pathos, puzzling, an incomplete sentiment. Now she, too, was sitting as though in an attitude of waiting. Burton felt his heart suddenly leap. What might lie beyond the wall was of no account. He was a man with only a few brief months to live, as he had come to understand life. He would follow the eternal philosophy. He would do as the others and make the best of them.