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hand. If she dared to follow her own inclinations, she would have asked Mr. Raymond to take her to see the hockey match now going on in the parks; but he would probably want to escort her to the Bodeleian. He sat down beside her, smiling kindly

"You look cold," he said, "and dismal. I am afraid I've kept you waiting, but I did not remember that you had appointed to meet me here."

Bess had done nothing of the kind, but did not think it necessary to say so; she had, indeed, felt a perverse pleasure in the thought that her wooer would find it difficult to discover her whereabouts. She smiled sweetly now, and then sighed.

"It makes me feel so old to come back here," she said, "dreadfully old. Kitty and I used to have such funin former days. We used to make up parties for picnics and things, and had so many friends. But most of the men we knew have gone down-and of course, anyhow, under present circumstances it would never do for me to play about as I used."

Mr. Raymond smiled encouragingly, and then, without replying to Bess's pathetic speech, remarked that he had brought her a piece of news which he thought would cheer her up.

"I wanted to be the first to tell you," he added; "it is great news, Bess."

His eyes were shining, his face full of triumphant joy.

"Kitty's engaged!" exclaimed Bess. "Good gracious, no!" he rejoined, vexed for the moment. "What put such an idea as that into your head?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Bess, confused. "There's such lots of men here -I thought-but of course it was silly of me."

"After all how could you guess?" returned he, once more kind and jubilant. "This news concerns your father, but indirectly concerns you all, for you will both be proud of the honor done him,

and Kitty at least will benefit materially by his good fortune. He has been offered the Chair of Poetry, Bess. It has been thought of here for some time, and his lecture clenched matters. The emoluments are by no means to be despised, he will probably live here altogether-it will be a good exchange for the Little Farm."

"Oh," cried Bess, clasping her hands, while tears jumped to her eyes-not tears of joy, as Mr. Raymond at first supposed, but tears of genuine, unmistakable distress. "Oh, if I'd only known! What a good time Kitty will have."

"My dear child," said Raymond very seriously.

"Oh, I can't help it," sobbed Bess. "I know I'm a beast, but still I am very young, and it's dreadful to be finishing one's life just when one might be beginning it, and have to be staid and matronly and all that, when I might be having-a real fling."

The tears were running down her face now; visions of unnumbered undergraduate adorers, of river parties, picnics, dances, delirious excitement of Eights Weeks and Commen-all, all would fall to the lot of the free and happy Kitty while she was trying to live up to the standard of her elderly husband. Mr. Raymond's voice broke in upon her meditations.

"The mistake is not irremediable-it can easily be put to rights, my dear little girl," he said. "Give me back that ring."

Bess looked up with a gasp. His face was pale, and had suddenly aged. "Give me the ring," he repeated firmly. "You shall have back your freedom, child."

The sight of his face, the sound of his voice roused something in Bess which had hitherto lain dormant, unguessed at by any one except Raymond himself-something not thoroughly awake yet, but which nevertheless

pulsed and stirred. For a moment the childish soul rose to the heights of womanhood. She stretched out her hand-not the hand that wore the ring, and clasped his.

"No," she said, "I couldn't do that. I couldn't break my word-besides I— I do think I love you. I wasn't really sure till now," she added naively.

Her eyes met his, and Raymond, after one glance at them, stooped and kissed her.

"God bless you, my little Bess," he said, "And now give me back that ring -you shall have your fling, my childyou shall dance and play and flirt as much as you like. Perhaps some day you will have had enough of it, and then if you have not changed your mind with regard to a certain old fellow, you will find him waiting still."

CHAPTER XII. THE LAST.

All preparations had been made for a hasty flitting, and Mr. Leslie and Bess joyfully prepared to begin life afresh under prosperous auspices. But Kitty secretly mourned; it seemed to her that she had taken root in this green remote corner, where, nevertheless, she had loved and suffered so much; the very tendrils of her heart seemed to cling to it, and she scarcely knew how she should endure being torn away from it.

A day or two before that fixed for their departure she gathered some violets and carried them to Sheba's grave; having arranged them in a little wreath upon the sodden grass, she leaned against the cross which headed it, so lost in thought that she did not hear Stephen Hardy's approach.

"I thought you were coming here," he said, as she turned with a start, "and I followed you-it's easier to say it here. I owe it both to the poor girl lying here, as well as yourself. I wronged you both."

"Oh, no," said Kitty faintly, "not me -you didn't wrong me."

"I wronged ye in my heart," he cried, "I think ye knew that. I was too harsh too hard-altogether unjust. I beg your pardon."

"Oh, you were right to blame me," returned Kitty. "I deserved to lose your good opinion. And I was unjust too."

"Nay, my good opinion isn't worth much," he returned sorrowfully. "God knows it isn't. "Twas natural enough for you so young as you werescarcely more than a child, to be a bit weak-but I! It little became me to set myself up in judgment."

He glanced downward at the grave and went on brokenly:

"I did her a cruel wrong in asking her to marry me, for I never loved her

as she ought to ha' been loved-the thought o' that's been my punishment. It's lain heavy on my heart ever since I lost her, and I couldn't part from you wi'out your knowing the truth."

"Oh, don't say that now," cried Kitty, with deep emotion; "don't say it here. Don't forget-your last words

to her were, 'You first.'"

"I can't let you think she was first!" he exclaimed vehemently. "Ye'd best know the truth. If Sheba was deceived, I thank God for it-I thank God my poor girl went to her death without a doubt of me-but when she called out to me to save you first I was sorely tempted to take her at her word. You're going away, they tell me, very soon now, and I may never meet ye face to face like this again-I'll not be a hypocrite at the last. Good-bye." He was turning away, when Kitty uttered a little cry:

"Oh, Stephen-don't go!"

The words escaped her involuntarily, but even as they fell from her lips it seemed to her that the whole worldthe little conventional world she had known-broke up and fell in ruins

about her. Pride, hereditary instinct. reticence-these had hitherto been the mainsprings of her conduct, causing her frequently to vacillate, cramping even her natural honesty and generosity; but courage had come to her now, and she knew her own mind at last. Let everything go, everything-except Stephen.

But Stephen did not speak, and Sheba's warning returned to her with almost stunning force:

The Times.

"He'll not humble himself to you twice"; and then another warning— Stephen's own:—

"I'll never ask you again."

He, too, was proud-and he never broke his word. It was her turn to humble herself now. She stretched out her hands to him across the grave:

"Stephen," she faltered, "I don't know how to say good-bye."

(THE END.)

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS. "This little book fed me in a very hungry place."

Coaching has its Nimrod, the Turf its Druid, the locomotive, nay, the upstart motor-car, has its heroics written in the whirlwind vein of "Tamburlaine the Great," with due accompaniment of gong and cymbals. But the bicycle, in the whole forty years of its popular existence, has found not a single literary champion. It has passed into a busy world unsung. The word "cycle," it has been decided by one school of thought, has proved a deterrent; the "bike" of booking-office parlance is more ignominious still. Had it but been called a pair-wheel, or a footwheel, or, as poet Barnes suggested, a "wheel-saddle," there might have been some hope for it. Or it might have been surnamed after St. Germain, the patron saint of the wheel. But plain unvarnished cycle! It is true that the hero of "Locksley Hall" speaks, but even then in belittling terms, of "a cycle of Cathay." Canon Beeching, Mr. Frank Sidgwick, Mr. Arthur Waugh, and others, have tried to berhyme an unkindly-named machine into the favor of those who resort to anthologies. Lord Byron, with the intuition of a true poet, has given utterance to a most intimate thought of the wheelman in the well-known

-A Tramp Abroad.

"My very chain and I grew friends, So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are."

And a master singer of to-day, Mr. Robert Bridges, may well have had the obnoxious word in mind when he wrote

"Riding adown the country lanes
One day in spring,

Heavy at heart with all the pains
Of man's imagining:
The mist was not yet melted quite
Into the sky;
The small round sun was dazzling
white,

The merry larks sang high."

But if so, he was careful not to name it. There is at any rate a suggestiveness about the surroundings which prompts the query-Was the poet awheel? For getting one up in the morning there is nothing like the prospect of a ride in early spring ere the mist has evaporated, when the pedals are yet new to the feet, and the-machine-seems to fly under the propulsion of leviathan muscles. Then is the time for observation and the flow of ideas. The pains of man's imagining evaporate with the mist. One may get off at the summit of a sharp rise, and,

lying beside the tandem-wheels on the turf, marvel with the ever-fresh adoration of the savage at the wonderful economy of mechanical forces which has enabled one to achieve such feats of locomotion with so little muscular effort. To a large proportion of the youth of this island it is here to be observed, howsoever little the poets may have observed it, there is a time when cycling is a passion, and when an incident of this passion, which comes with the cuckoo, is an almost frenzied desire to possess a first-grade machine ("costly thy cycle as thy purse can buy" is the saw of the cycling Polonius), gleaming with fresh enamel, glittering with polished nickel, and with all the latest improvements. At such moments of May one says to oneself that March is the wheelman's broom, April is his sprinkler; and that, if it is "a good thing to be a tree in April," it is still better to be awheel in the months that ensue. In such moments even a philosopher may be hard put to it to combat lawless impulses. One of the first thoughts of that excellent Mr. Kipps on coming into a fortune-twelve hundred a-year, bit over, if anything-was, "I could buy a cycle and a cycling suit." This is a touch true to our insular nature.

Riding through the sunset and the long-deferred dusk of a summer-long day in the heart of rural England, when everything looks delectable, and the heart for a brief moment is perfectly happy, who has not caught something of the poet's deep longing for beauty the ideal, for an art that shall thrill the souls of men, the beauty of the bride, of young boys laughing as they sing, of the adorable English landscape into which one longs to melt. No pastime cultivates this kind of vision of the beauté du saison and the transforming atmosphere of our homeland so much as the least celebrated. No form of recreation is so inarticulate

as bicycling. If you meet two or more cyclists in an inn after a day's run you will hear, it is more than likely, little save tiresome references to miles and to machinery, to times and distances, and it will need something of an effort, some discernment to discover behind all this trivial, and probably clumsy, chatter of cranks and spindles that, after all, much has been felt, and, it may be, that better part which can never be expressed, of the romance of the open road. The obscure and profound sensations aroused by the wedding of oxygen and hot braced muscle, the large horizons of the upland, the verdurous gloom of the dingles, the rush of the air around and of the road beneath, the flight of the hedgerows, the whisper and whirr of the harddriven wheel, the masterful pace and comradeship of the highway, the victorious struggle with the rising road, the steady intentness of effort, and gradual conquest of distance by one's own exertion-all these things, and many more, have sought without finding expression, and gradually translated themselves into a "tedious, brief," practical colloquy upon the "points" of visible wonder in the machine to which all these sensations are due. Such sensations, as one knows, are felt most vividly in youth, when the greensward of England is as yet a terra incognita to the hardy wheelman, adventurous in setting forth. The full joy and lustre of such emotions, when a finely wooded gorge or a landscape of that supreme kind which overlooks a whole panorama evokes the sensation best expressed in the ejaculation of the Psalmist, "O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer!"-all this cannot be completely recaptured. Sombre thoughts will invade the most cheerful.

"Round me, too, the night

In ever nearing circles weaves her shade.

I see her veil drawn soft across the day,

I feel her slowly chilling breath invade The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with gray;

I feel her finger light

Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train,

The foot less prompt to meet the

morning dew,

The heart less bounding at emotion

new,

And hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again."

A time must come to all of us when we too realize for the first time that ours also is "the common lot." That we cannot jump so high or squat so low as we could once upon a time. That a pace of nine miles an hour is rather reckless even upon a bicycle. And yet I maintain, that even here a bicycle (which is in so many other respects the best anodyne to passing depressions) is also the least cruel of disenchanters. Its joys are less confined to the sunny side of forty than those of almost any other form of athletic recreation. There is of course the gospel of youth-of "sweet and twenty," a "fine young speed-man" of two-andtwenty, or possibly one-and-thirty. But many enterprises rich and rare have commenced at forty. The cyclist of fifty may still do his "hundred." One begins to value these late starters adequately as the gray hairs appear. Who can fail to appreciate the undimmed achievement at forty, nay, at twice forty, of Titian, Cardinal Fleury, Leo XIII., Mark Twain, Lord Wemyss, Lord Roberts? The "old high" machine, it is true, was an inveterate enemy to old age. To learn it at all was hardly practicable. The great, high horse of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury so fondly proclaims his mastery were not so formidable. But the therapeutic properties of the modern bicycle as a renewer of youth and prolonger of age deserve far more celebra

tion than they have yet received, and it might well be maintained that the wheel should be added as a new symbol to the serpent of Esculapius. The historical side of cycling is not wholly negligible, as we may (hereafter) have occasion to show; but, whether we approach it from the practical, scientific, or sentimental side, the subject is as great as it is prolific, and one has been on the look out for a literary organon of cycling for years and years.

It is something, therefore, of an announcement to be able to make that the man and the book have at last been discovered. But so it is, as I think that all readers of Mr. Allen's recently appeared "Wheel Magic" will agree with me in concluding. A little book of a couple of hundred pages all told, which will go into a pocket, has for the first time definitely savored and appraised the mood of the joyous cyclist. The scientific critics, the austere commentators of the "Cycling Tourists' Club Gazette," have already hailed it from afar as an undoubted first at tempt to express the aspirations, the humor and philosophy, of the wheelman in a form compatible with the severe limitations of Belles Lettres. An Izaak Walton of cycling at best would probably be an anachronism; but what Robert Louis Stevenson achieved for donkey travel and canotage, that it may fairly be contended that Mr. Allen has attempted with equal success for the man whose music is to be found in the hum o' the wheel. Such light freightage is inadequate, of course, as our philosopher himself observes. "How feebly do these essays reflect the delight I have found on the road." That joy, like all the things that are really worth communicating, is incommunicable by mere words. And yet it all seems so simple. "I hear the sirens singing. I ride out into

1 "Wheel Magic; or Revolutions of an Impressionist." By J. W. Allen. The Bodley Head. 1909.

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