urally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed
of bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on
foam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank
teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard to
imagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of Oneida
Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there merely to
pass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was aware of his
existence.

That may be a slight exaggeration. She knew, perhaps, that he was
the new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from the
Maritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and that
he had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa, and
that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church, and that his salary
was eight hundred dollars. Beyond that, she didn't know a thing about
him. She presumed, however, that the reason why he went past so fast was
because he didn't dare to go slow.

This, of course, was perfectly correct. Ever since the day when Mr.
Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on his
bicycle just after bank hours. He would have gone past twenty times a
day but he was afraid to. As he came up Oneida Street, he used to pedal
faster and faster,--he never meant to, but he couldn't help it,--till he
went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with his
little yellow blazer flying in the wind. In a second he had disappeared
in a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the momentum of it carried him clear
out into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pause
or look back.

Then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country, trying
to think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his bicycle
would be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida Street, and
would get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the pedals whirled
round with a buzz and he came past the judge's house again, like a
bullet out of a gun. He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, and
even then it took all the nerve that he had.

The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but Zena
Pepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a sort
of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride of
Tancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.

I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. P