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But Margaret dreaded and disliked him all the more for his good qualities. To-day this secret apprehension flung a cloud over the 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 toward 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, arching 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 poorhouse, and that her husband quarrelled with all his family and married her in the poorhouse, 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 woman, but she must have an iron streak in her somewhere, for she was left without enough money to pay the funeral expenses, and she educated the boy and accumulated enough money to pay for this place they have.

“She used to run a laundry, and made money; but when Cyril got a place in the bank she sold out the laundry and went into chickens and vegetables; she told somebody that it wasn’t so profitable as the laundry, but it was more genteel, and Cyril being now in a position of trust at the bank, she must consider him. Cyril swept out the bank. People laughed about it, but, do you know, I rather liked Mrs. Winslow for it. She isn’t in the least an assertive woman. How long have we been up here, Maggie? Isn’t it four years? And they have been our next-door neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he talks to Sibyl, and said, ‘If you’ll excuse me offering advice, Miss Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very much to move it at a fire. I think, if you will allow me, I can extinguish this.’ And he did, too, didn’t he, as neatly and as coolly as if it were only adding up a column of figures. And offered me the engine as a souvenir of the occasion afterward.”