Milton. Then two women weeping together, and a knightly figure in

the background dressed in a handsome Norfolk jacket, still
conspicuously new. He would conceal his feeling until the very

end. Then, leaving, he would pause in the doorway in such an
attitude as Mr. George Alexander might assume, and say, slowly

and dwindlingly: "Be kind to her--BE kind to her," and so depart,
heartbroken to the meanest intelligence. But that was a matter

for the future. He would have to begin discussing the return
soon. There was no traffic along the road, and he came up beside

her (he had fallen behind in his musing). She began to talk. "Mr.
Denison," she began, and then, doubtfully, "That is your name?

I'm very stupid--"
"It is," said Mr. Hoopdriver. (Denison, was it? Denison, Denison,

Denison. What was she saying?)
"I wonder how far you are willing to help me?" Confoundedly hard

to answer a question like that on the spur of the moment, without
steering wildly. "You may rely--" said Mr. Hoopdriver, recovering

from a violent wabble. "I can assure you-- I want to help you
very much. Don't consider me at all. Leastways, consider me

entirely at your service." (Nuisance not to be able to say this
kind of thing right.)

"You see, I am so awkwardly situated."
"If I can only help you--you will make me very happy--" There was

a pause. Round a bend in the road they came upon a grassy space
between hedge and road, set with yarrow and meadowsweet, where a

felled tree lay among the green. There she dismounted, and
propping her machine against a stone, sat down. "Here, we can

talk," she said.
"Yes," said Mr. Hoopdriver, expectant.

She answered after a little while, sitting, elbow on knee, with
her chin in her hand, and looking straight in front of her. "I

don't know--I am resolved to Live my Own Life."
"Of course," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "Naturally."

"I want to Live, and I want to see what life means. I want to
learn. Everyone is hurrying me, everything is hurrying me; I want

time to think."
Mr. Hoopdriver was puzzled, but admiring. It was wonderful how

clear and ready her words were. But then one might speak well
with a throat and lips like that. He knew he was inadequate, but

he tried to meet the occasion. "If you let them rush you into
anything you might repent of, of course you'd be very silly."

"Don't YOU want to learn?" she asked.
"I was wondering only this morning," he began, and stopped.

She was too intent upon her own thoughts to notice this
insufficiency. "I find myself in life, and it terrifies me. I

seem to be like a little speck, whirling on a wheel, suddenly
caught up. 'What am I here for?' I ask. Simply to be here at a

time--I asked it a week ago, I asked it yesterday, and I ask it
to-day. And little things happen and the days pass. My stepmother

takes me shopping, people come to tea, there is a new play to
pass the time, or a concert, or a novel. The wheels of the world

go on turning, turning. It is horrible. I want to do a miracle
like Joshua and stop the whirl until I have fought it out. At

home--It's impossible."
Mr. Hoopdriver stroked his moustache. "It IS so," he said in a

meditative tone. "Things WILL go on," he said. The faint breath
of summer stirred the trees, and a bunch of dandelion puff lifted

among the meadowsweet and struck and broke into a dozen separate
threads against his knee. They flew on apart, and sank, as the

breeze fell, among the grass: some to germinate, some to perish.
His eye followed them until they had vanished.

"I can't go back to Surbiton," said the Young Lady in Grey.
"EIGH?" said Mr. Hoopdriver, catching at his moustache. This was

an unexpected development.
"I want to write, you see," said the Young Lady in Grey, "to

write Books and alter things. To do Good. I want to lead a Free
Life and Own myself. I can't go back. I want to obtain a position

as a journalist. I have been told--But I know no one to help me
at once. No one that I could go to. There is one person--She was

a mistress at my school. If I could write to her--But then, how
could I get her answer?"

"H'mp," said Mr. Hoopdriver, very grave.
"I can't trouble you much more. You have come--you have risked

things--"
"That don't count," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "It's double pay to let

me do it, so to speak."
"It is good of you to say that. Surbiton is so Conventional. I am

resolved to be Unconventional--at any cost. But we are so
hampered. If I could only burgeon out of all that hinders me! I

want to struggle, to take my place in the world. I want to be my
own mistress, to shape my own career. But my stepmother objects

so. She does as she likes herself, and is strict with me to ease
her conscience. And if I go back now, go back owning myself

beaten--" She left the rest to his imagination.
"I see that," agreed Mr. Hoopdriver. He MUST help her. Within his

skull he was doing some intricatearithmetic with five pounds six
and twopence. In some vague way he inferred from all this that

Jessie was trying to escape from an undesirable marriage, but was
saying these things out of modesty. His circle of ideas was so

limited.
"You know, Mr.--I've forgotten your name again."

Mr. Hoopdriver seemed lost in abstraction. "You can't go back of
course, quite like that," he said thoughtfully. His ears waxed

suddenly red and his cheeks flushed.
"But what IS your name?"

"Name!" said Mr. Hoopdriver. "Why!--Benson, of course."
"Mr. Benson--yes it's really very stupid of me. But I can never

remember names. I must make a note on my cuff." She clicked a
little silver pencil and wrote the name down. "If I could write

to my friend. I believe she would be able to help me to an
independent life. I could write to her--or telegraph. Write, I

think. I could scarcely explain in a telegram. I know she would
help me."

Clearly there was only one course open to a gentleman under the
circumstances. "In that case," said Mr. Hoopdriver, "if you don't

mind trusting yourself to a stranger, we might continue as we are
perhaps. For a day or so. Until you heard." (Suppose thirty

shillings a day, that gives four days, say four thirties is hun'
and twenty, six quid,--well, three days, say; four ten.)

"You are very good to me."
His expression was eloquent.

"Very well, then, and thank you. It's wonderful--it's more than I
deserve that you--" She dropped the theme abruptly. "What was our

bill at Chichester?"
"Eigh?" said Mr. Hoopdriver, feigning a certain stupidity. There

was a brief discussion. Secretly he was delighted at her
insistence in paying. She carried her point. Their talk came

round to their immediate plans for the day. They decided to ride
easily, through Havant, and stop, perhaps, at Fareham or

Southampton. For the previous day had tried them both. Holding
the map extended on his knee, Mr. Hoopdriver's eye fell by chance

on the bicycle at his feet. "That bicycle," he remarked, quite
irrelevantly, "wouldn't look the same machine if I got a big,

double Elarum instead of that little bell."
"Why?"

"Jest a thought." A pause.
"Very well, then,--Havant and lunch," said Jessie, rising.

"I wish, somehow, we could have managed it without stealing that
machine," said Hoopdriver. "Because it IS stealing it, you know,