“And fancy, Aunt Margaret,” laughed Sibyl, “he has asked both auntie and me to the theatre.  He is not going to compromise himself by singling one of us out.  He’s a careful soul.  By the way, Aunt Margaret, Mrs. Winslow was telling me yesterday that I am the image of auntie at my age.  Am I?  Do I look like her?  Was she as slender as I?”

“Almost,” said Mrs. Ellis, who was not so inflexibly truthful as her friend.

“No, Sibyl,” said Lorania, with a deep, deep sigh, “I was always plump; I was a chubby child!  And oh, what do you think I heard in the crowd at Manly’s once?  One woman said to another, ’Miss Hopkins has got a wheel.’  ‘Miss Sibyl?’ said the other.  ‘No; the stout Miss Hopkins,’ said the first creature; and the second—­” Lorania groaned.

“What did she say to make you feel that way?”

“She said—­she said, ‘Oh my!’” answered Lorania, with a dying look.

“Well, she was horrid,” said Mrs. Ellis; “but you know you have grown thin.  Come on; let’s ride!”

“I never shall be able to ride,” said Lorania, gloomily.  “I can get on, but I can’t get off.  And they’ve taken off the brake, so I can’t stop.  And I’m object-struck by everything I look at.  Some day I shall look down-hill.  Well, my will’s in the lower drawer of the mahogany desk.”

Perhaps Lorania had an occult inkling of the future.  For this is what happened:  That evening Winslow rode on to the track in his new English bicycle suit, which had just come.  He hoped that he didn’t look like a fool in those queer clothes.  But the instant he entered the pasture he saw something that drove everything else out of his head, and made him bend over the steering-bar and race madly across the green; Miss Hopkins’s bicycle was running away down-hill!  Cardigan, on foot, was pelting obliquely, in the hopeless thought to intercept her, while Mrs. Ellis, who was reeling over the ground with her own bicycle, wheeled as rapidly as she could to the brow of the hill, where she tumbled off, and abandoning the wheel, rushed on foot to her friend’s rescue.

She was only in time to see a flash of silver and ebony and a streak of brown dart before her vision and swim down the hill like a bird.  Lorania was still in the saddle, pedalling from sheer force of habit, and clinging to the handle bars.  Below the hill was a stone wall, and farther was a creek.  There was a narrow opening in the wall where the cattle went down to drink; if she could steer through that she would have nothing worse than soft water and mud; but there was not one chance in a thousand that she could pass that narrow space.  Mrs. Winslow, horror-stricken, watched the rescuer, who evidently was cutting across to catch the bicycle.

“He’s riding out of sight!” thought Shuey, in the rear.  He himself did not slacken his speed, although he could not be in time for the catastrophe.  Suddenly he stiffened; Winslow was close to the runaway wheel.