“Well,” said I, to myself, as I put my money back into my pocket, “it is a queer country, this Cathay.”

As I approached the lodge, I felt that perhaps I had received a lesson, but I was not sure.  I would wait and let circumstances decide.  The gardener was away attending to his duties; but his wife was there, and when she came forward, with a frank, cheery greeting, I instantly decided that I had had a lesson.  I thanked her, as earnestly as I knew how, for what she had done for me, and then I added: 

“You and your husband have treated me with such kind hospitality that I am not going to offer you anything in return for what you have done.”

“You would have hurt us, sir, if you had,” said she.

Then, in order to change the subject, I spoke of the honor which had been bestowed upon me by being allowed to wear the Duke’s dressing-gown.  She smiled, and replied: 

“Honors would always be easy for you, sir, if you only chose to take them.”

As I rode away I thought that the last remark of the gardener’s wife seemed to show a mental brightness above her station, although I did not know exactly what she meant.  “Can it be,” I asked myself, “that she fancies that good family, six feet of athletic muscle, and no money would be considered sufficient to make matrimonial honors easy on that estate?” If such an idea had come into her head, it certainly was a very foolish one, and I determined to drive it from my mind by thinking of something else.

Suddenly I slackened my speed.  I stopped and put one foot to the ground.  What a hard-hearted wretch I thought myself to be!  Here I was thinking of all sorts of nonsense and speeding away without a thought of the young girl who had hurt herself the day before and who had been helped by me to her home!  She lived but a few miles back, and I had determined, the evening before, to run down and see how she was getting on before starting on my day’s journey.

I turned and went bowling back over the road on which I had been so terribly drenched the previous afternoon.  In a very little while my bicycle was leaning against the fence of the pretty house by the road-side, and I had entered the front yard.  The slender girl was sitting on the piazza behind some vines.  When she saw me she quickly closed the book she was reading, drew one foot from a little stool, and rose to meet me.  There was more color on her face than I had supposed would be likely to find its way there, and her bright eyes showed that she was not only surprised but glad to see me.

“I thought you were ever so far on your journey!” she said.  “And how did you get through that awful storm?”

“I want to know first about your foot,” I said—­“how is that?”