bicycle enthusiasm. She could not help wondering whether at this moment
Lorania was not thinking of the marquis, who rode a wheel and a horse
admirably.

"Aunt Lorania," said Sibyl, "there comes Mr. Winslow. Shall I run out
and ask him about those cloth-of-gold roses? The aphides are eating them
all up."

"Yes, to be sure, dear; but don't let Ferguson suspect what you are
talking of; he might feel hurt."

Ferguson was the gardener. Miss Hopkins left her note to go to the
window. Below she saw a mettled horse, with tossing head and silken
skin, restlessly fretting on his bit and pawing the dust in front of
the fence, while his rider, hat in hand, talked with the young girl. He
was a little man, a very little man, in a gray business suit of the best
cut and material. An air of careful and dainty neatness was diffused
about both horse and rider. He bent towards Miss Sibyl's charming person
a thin, alert, fair face. His head was finely shaped, the brown hair
worn away a little on the temples. He smiled gravely at intervals; the
smile told that he had a dimple in his cheek.

"I wonder," said Mrs. Ellis, "whether Mr. Winslow can have a penchant
for Sibyl?"

Lorania opened her eyes. At this moment Mr. Winslow had caught sight of
her at the window, and he bowed almost to his saddle-bow; Sibyl was
saying something at which she laughed, and he visibly reddened. It was a
peculiarity of his that his color turned easily. In a second his hat was
on his head and his horse bounded half across the road.

"Hardly, I think," said Lorania. "How well he rides! I never knew any
one ride better--in this country."

"I suppose Sibyl would ridicule such a thing," said Mrs. Ellis,
continuing her own train of thought, and yet vaguely disturbed by the
last sentence.

"Why should she?"

"Well, he is so little, for one thing, and she is so tall. And then
Sibyl thinks a great deal of social position."

"He is a Winslow," said Lorania, archin her neck unconsciously--"a
lineal descendant from Kenelm Winslow, who came over in the _May_--"

"But his mother--"

"I don't know anything about his mother before she came here. Oh, of
course I know the gossip that she was a niece of the overseer at a
village poor-house, and that her husband quarrelled with all his family
and married her in the poor-house, and I know that when he died here she
would not take a cent from the Winslows, nor let them have the boy. She
is the meekest-looking little w