“Shuey will teach us,” she went on, “and we can have a track made in your pasture, where nobody can see us learning.  Lorania, there’s nothing like it.  Let me bring you the bicycle edition of Harper’s Bazar.”

Miss Hopkins capitulated at once, and sat down to order her costume, while Sibyl, the niece, revelled silently in visions of a new bicycle which should presently revert to her.  “For it’s ridiculous, auntie’s thinking of riding!” Miss Sibyl considered.  “She would be a figure of fun on a wheel; besides, she can never learn in this world!”

Yet Sibyl was attached to her aunt, and enjoyed visiting Hopkins Manor, as Lorania had named her new house, into which she moved on the same day that she joined the Colonial Dames, by right of her ancestor the great and good divine commemorated by Mrs. Stowe.  Lorania’s friends were all fond of her, she was so good-natured and tolerant, with a touch of dry humor in her vision of things, and not the least a Puritan in her frank enjoyment of ease and luxury.  Nevertheless, Lorania had a good, able-bodied, New England conscience, capable of staying awake nights without flinching; and perhaps from her stanch old Puritan forefathers she inherited her simple integrity so that she neither lied nor cheated—­even in the small, whitewashed manner of her sex—­and valued loyalty above most of the virtues.  She had an innocent pride in her godly and martial ancestry, which was quite on the surface, and led people who did not know her to consider her haughty.

For fifteen years she had been an orphan, the mistress of a very large estate.  No doubt she had been sought often in marriage, but never until lately had Lorania seriously thought of marrying.  Sibyl said that she was too unsentimental to marry.  Really she was too romantic.  She had a longing to be loved, not in the quiet, matter-of-fact manner of her suitors, but with the passion of the poets.  Therefore the presence of another skeleton in Mrs. Ellis’s closet, because she knew about a certain handsome Italian marquis who at this period was conducting an impassioned wooing by mail.  Margaret did not fancy the marquis.  He was not an American.  He would take Lorania away.  She thought his very virtue florid, and suspected that he had learned his love-making in a bad school.  She dropped dark hints that frightened Lorania, who would sometimes piteously demand, “Don’t you think he could care for me—­for—­for myself?” Margaret knew that she had an overweening distrust of her own appearance.  How many tears she had shed first and last over her unhappy plumpness it would be hard to reckon.  She made no account of her satin skin, or her glossy black hair, or her lustrous violet eyes with their long, black lashes, or her flashing white teeth; she glanced dismally at her shape and scornfully at her features, good, honest, irregular American features, that might not satisfy a Greek critic, but suited each other and pleased her countrymen.  And then she would sigh heavily over her figure.  Her friend had not the heart to impute the marquis’s beautiful, artless compliments to mercenary motives.  After all, the Italian was a good fellow, according to the point of view of his own race, if he did intend to live on his wife’s money, and had a very varied assortment of memories of women.