ellous to be true. The bicycle lesson was her hour of magic;
and more so on this night than on previous nights.

"I must change my dress," she had said. "I can't go in this one."

"Quick, then!"

His impatience could not wait. He had helped her. He undid hooks, and
fastened others.... The rich blue frock lay across the bed and looked
lovely on the ivory-coloured counterpane. It seemed indeed to be a
part of that in her which was Louise. Then she was in a short skirt
which she had devised herself, and he was pushing her out of the room,
his hand on her back. And she had feigned reluctance, resisting his
pressure, while laughing with gleeful eagerness to be gone. No delay
had been allowed. As they passed through the kitchen, not one instant
for parley with Mrs. Tams as to the domestic organization of the
evening! He was still pushing her.... Thus she had had to confide her
precious house and its innumerable treasures to Mrs. Tams. And in this
surrender to Louis' whim there was a fearful joy.

When Louis turned at last into Park Road, and stepped from between the
wheels, she exclaimed, a little breathless from quick walking level
with him up the hill--

"I can't bear to see you ride so well. Oh!" She crunched her teeth
with a loving, cruel gesture. "I should like to hurt you frightfully!"

"What for?"

"Because I shall never, never be able to ride as well as you do!"

He winked.

"Here! Take hold."

"I'm not ready! I'm not ready!" she cried.

But he loosed the machine, and she was obliged to seize it as it fell.
That was his teasing.

Park Road had been the scene of the lesson for three nights. It was
level, and it was unfrequented. "And the doctor's handy in case
you break your neck," Louis had said. Dr. Yardley's red lamp shone
amicably among yellow lights, and its ray with theirs was lost in the
mysterious obscurities of the closed park. Not only was it socially
advisable for Rachel to study the perverse nature of the bicycle at
night--for not to know how to ride the bicycle was as shameful as not
to know how to read and write--but she preferred the night for the
romantic feeling of being alone with Louis, in the dark and above the
glow of the town. She loved the sharp night wind on her cheek, and
the faint clandestine rustling of the low evergreens within the park
palisade, and the invisible and almost tangible soft sky, revealed
round the horizon by gleams of fire. She had longed to ride the
bicycle as