in a short cloth skirt, cut with that
unmistakable touch which we call style--betokened weariness that could
no longer wait for rest.

Poor child! she was tired out. She must never be left to sleep on
there, for she seemed good to sleep till midnight.

I turned to her bicycle, and, examining it with the air of a man who
had won silver cups in his day, I speedily discovered what had been the
mischief. The tire of the front wheel had been pierced, and a great
thorn was protruding from the place. Evidently this had been too much
for poor Rosalind, and it was not unlikely that she had cried herself
to sleep.

I bent over her to look--yes, there were traces of tears. Poor thing!
Then I had a kindly human impulse. I would mend the tire, having
attended ambulance classes, do it very quietly so that she wouldn't
hear, like the fairy cobblers who used to mend people's boots while
they slept, and then wait in ambush to watch the effect upon her when
she awoke.

What do you think of the idea?

But one important detail I have omitted from my description of the
sleeper. Her left hand lay gloveless, and of the four rings on her
third finger one was a wedding-ring.

"Such red hair,--and a wedding-ring!" I exclaimed inwardly. "How this
woman must have suffered!"

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH I HEAL A BICYCLE AND COME TO THE WHEEL OF PLEASURE

Moving the bicycle a little away, so that my operations upon it might
not arouse her, I had soon made all right again, and when I laid it
once more where she had left it, she was still sleeping as sound as
ever. She had only to sleep long enough, a sly thought suggested, to
necessitate her ending her day's journey at the same inn as myself,
some five miles on the road. One virtue at least the reader will allow
to this history,--we are seldom far away from an inn in its pages.
When I thought of that I sat stiller than ever, hardly daring to turn
over the pages of Apuleius, which I had taken from my knapsack to
beguile the time, and, I confess, to give my eyes some other occupation
than the dangerous one of gazing upon her face, dangerous in more ways
than one, but particularly dangerous at the moment, because, as
everybody knows, a steady gaze on a sleeping face is apt to awake the
sleeper. And she wasn't to be disturbed!

"No! she mustn't waken before seven at the latest," I said to myself,
holding my breath and starting in terror at every noise. Once a great
noisy bee was withi