n an ace of waking her, but I caught him with
inspired dexterity, and he buzzed around her head no more.

But despite the providential loneliness of the road, there were one or
two terrors that could not be disposed of so summarily. The worst of
all was a heavy miller's cart which one could hardly crush to silence
in one's handkerchief; but it went so slowly, and both man and horses
were so sleepy, that they passed unheard and unnoticing.

A sprightly tramp promised greater difficulty, and nothing but some
ferocious pantomime and a shilling persuaded him to forego a choice
fantasia of cockney humour.

A poor tired Italian organ-grinder, tramping with an equally tired
monkey along the dusty roads, had to be bought off in a similar
manner,--though he only cost sixpence. He gave me a Southern smile and
shrug of comprehension, as one acquainted with affairs of the
heart,--which was a relief after the cockney tramp's impudent
expression of, no doubt, a precisely similar sentiment.

And then at last, just as my watch pointed to 6.50 (how well I remember
the exact moment!) Rosalind awoke suddenly, as women and children do,
sitting straight up on the instant, and putting up her hands to her
tousled hair, with a half-startled "Where am I?" When her hair was
once more "respectable," she gave her skirts a shake, bent sideways to
pull up her stockings and tighten her garters, looked at her watch, and
then with an exclamation at the lateness of the hour, went over, with
an air of desperate determination, to her bicycle.

"Now for this horrid puncture!" were the first words I was to hear fall
from her lips.

She sought for the wound in the india-rubber with growing bewilderment.

"Goodness!" was her next exclamation, "why, there's nothing wrong with
it. Can I have been dreaming?"

"I hope your dreams have been pleasanter than that," I ventured at this
moment to stammer, rising, a startling apparition, from my ambush
behind a mound of brambles; and before she had time to take in the
situation I added that I hoped she'd excuse my little pleasantry, and
told her how I had noticed her and the wounded bicycle, et cetera, et
cetera, as the reader can well imagine, without giving me the trouble
of writing it all out.

She was sweetness itself on the instant.

"Excuse you!" she said, "I should think so. Who wouldn't? You can't
tell the load you've taken off my mind. I'm sure I must have groaned
in my sleep--for I confess I