slightest, because it happened that subsequently
Hoopdriver saw a great deal more of this other man in brown. The other
cyclist in brown had a machine of dazzling newness, and a punctured
pneumatic lay across his knees. He was a man of thirty or more, with a
whitish face, an aquiline nose, a lank, flaxen moustache, and very fair
hair, and he scowled at the job before him. At the sight of him Mr.
Hoopdriver pulled himself together, and rode by with the air of one born
to the wheel. "A splendid morning," said Mr. Hoopdriver, "and a fine
surface."

"The morning and you and the surface be everlastingly damned!" said the
other man in brown as Hoopdriver receded. Hoopdriver heard the mumble
and did not distinguish the words, and he felt a pleasing sense of
having duly asserted the wide sympathy that binds all cyclists together,
of having behaved himself as becomes one of the brotherhood of the
wheel. The other man in brown watched his receding aspect. "Greasy
proletarian," said the other man in brown, feeling a prophetic dislike.
"Got a suit of brown, the very picture of this. One would think his sole
aim in life had been to caricature me. It's Fortune's way with me. Look
at his insteps on the treadles! Why does Heaven make such men?"

And having lit a cigarette, the other man in brown returned to the
business in hand.

Mr. Hoopdriver worked up the hill towards Cobham to a point that he felt
sure was out of sight of the other man in brown, and then he dismounted
and pushed his machine; until the proximity of the village and a proper
pride drove him into the saddle again.

VIII.

Beyond Cobham came a delightful incident, delightful, that is, in its
beginning if a trifle indeterminate in the retrospect. It was perhaps
half-way between Cobham and Ripley. Mr. Hoopdriver dropped down a little
hill, where, unfenced from the road, fine mossy trees and bracken lay on
either side; and looking up he saw an open country before him, covered
with heather and set with pines, and a yellow road running across it,
and half a mile away perhaps, a little grey figure by the wayside waving
something white. "Never!" said Mr. Hoopdriver with his hands tightening
on the handles.

He resumed the treadles, staring away before him, jolted over a stone,
wabbled, recovered, and began riding faster at once, with his eyes
ahead. "It can't be," said Hoopdriver.

He rode his straightest, and kept his pedals spinning, albeit a limp
numbness ha