“Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat,

And he is strike out of my bokes clene

For ever-mo; ther is non other mene.

Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,

I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;

Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene.”

Ten minutes later Peter stirred and yawned. He sat up and began to stretch himself. But in the very act thereof he stopped, and a gleam of humorous amazement shot into his blue eyes, for on the grass beside him a man was sitting, calmly reading from his own rather shabby book.

The man looked up.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” said Peter, with a brilliant smile.

The man laughed. “I ought to apologize,” he said. “The fact is, when I first saw you lying there asleep I took you for a tramp. Then I [Pg 12]came nearer and saw my mistake. I also saw the book. The temptation to talk to a man who obviously loved the open air and read Chaucer was too much for me. I sat down to wait till you should awake.”

[Pg 12]

“Very good of you,” replied Peter. “But you didn’t make a mistake, I am a tramp.”

“So am I,” responded the other, “on a walking tour.”

Peter sat up very deliberately now. He broke off a piece of grass, which he began to nibble. Through the nibbling he spoke:

“But I presume that your walking tour is of fairly brief duration; mine has lasted rather more than two years.”

The other man looked at him curiously. “You love the open as much as that?”

“Oh, I love the open well enough,” replied Peter airily; “but that’s not the whole reason. I can’t afford a roof.”

Now, the very obvious reply to this would have been that Peter, a young man and, moreover, clearly one of education, might very well work for a roof. But it being so extremely obvious that this was what Peter might do, it was also obvious that [Pg 

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