insisted Nan, doubtfully.

"You try it," suggested the governess. "If it suits you it will
certainly be too high for me."

"It does suit me," announced Nan, balancing herself by a hand against
the wall. "You'd better send it back and get a lower frame."

But Miss Blake shook her head.

"No, I like this and I'm going to keep it. But of course if it is too
high I can't use it, and so--so--I'm afraid you'll have to, Nan. You
won't mind, will you? I mean getting your birthday present this way
ahead of time? I thought if we waited you'd lose the whole summer."

Nan flung herself from the wheel in a rapture of surprise. It seemed
too good to be true. She could not believe it. Miss Blake had her
thanks more in the girl's radiant delight than in the mere words she
spoke, though these were genuine enough and full enough of gratitude.

All through the long season after that, whenever the heat was not too
intense, Nan and her wheel could have been seen flashing through the
Park or taking a well-earned rest in the cool shadow of the Dairy
porch, where a sip of water seemed sweeter than ambrosia and a fugitive
breeze more aromatic than any zephyr from Araby the blest.

Sometimes she and Miss Blake took longer trips into the country, and
then the governess had to be constant in her warnings to her against
her reckless fashion of riding. Again and again she spoke, and Nan
always meant to take heed and then always forgot, and fell back into
her old way once more.

"I can't resist such a coast as that was," she would plead. "And if I
got off for every old man who thinks he has the right to the road I'd
be dismounting all the while."

"I beg you not to take such risks," Miss Blake would rejoin. "It
simply spoils my ride for me, Nan, to see you so reckless. Such
head-long wheeling has nothing to recommend it. It is neither expert
nor admirable. When you fling along so blindly you are merely doing a
foolish, heedless thing and running serious risks. I am sure you will
come to grief some day."

"Don't you worry! I am as much at home in my saddle as I would be in a
rocking-chair. See me ride without touching the handle-bars!"

And presently she would lose all recollection of her good resolve, and
go hurling on at a break-neck speed in the van of some skittish horse,
or slowly zig-zag ahead in the path of some stolid coachman, causing
him to anathematize all wheelmen in general and this especially
provoking spe