Justin was too well-fed to be imaginative. And the creature after all had spoken, had asked him something in good enough English: on its bewildering head it wore the most ordinary child’s sailor cap with a gilt lettering on the ribbon—H.M.S. _Indomitable_; yet, for a ridiculous instant, its fugitive, bodiless air beguiled him, and he could have believed himself agape before a changeling, a come-by-chance of wind and rain, a fairy nothing, gone with the sky’s first dispelling streak of blue. “If you please,” the creature began again anxiously, and stopped. There was a sound of yielding hay, and before Justin could stretch out a hand it had disappeared with some suddenness. There was a scuffle and a bump, and Justin thought he heard a whimper. He rolled lazily to the edge of the shelf and looked over. The child—he could see now that it was a little girl—was standing below him in the crushed stubble, brushing mournfully with a handful of the treacherous hay at the mud that plastered its wisp of skirt. It had the gallantest air of assuring itself that nothing on earth should induce it to cry; though its eyes, as it lifted them to Justin again, had that shimmering brilliance that only unshed tears can give. But it returned to the charge. “If you please——” Then, with a sudden alluring solicitude, “It’s only me. I’m not a tramp. Oh, I hope I didn’t frighten you?” “Well—it was a bit of a shock.” Justin looked amused. “I may get over it.” “I’m so sorry. It’s fearful meeting tramps, isn’t it?” She had all the Kent child’s horror of its bogey in her voice. “That’s why I was frightened, too. I thought you were one, at first——” Justin murmured his gratification. She amended anxiously. “Oh, only from far off. But even if you were, I _had_ to ask the way. And when I saw the bicycle I knew you couldn’t be. It’s a lovely bicycle.” She regarded it with wistful admiration and, insensibly, Justin thawed, like any other male child between eight and eighty, to the feminine intelligence that appreciated his hobby. “It’s not bad,” he admitted, stretching out a long arm to twitch modestly at the bicycle’s covering, much as a woman straightens the hat that a man’s glance has told her is becoming. “Humber, you know.” She nodded eagerly. “They’re the best, aren’t they? Mother’s is a Swift. She’s going to have a Humber, though, when she comes back. She’s going to teach me to ride, then. She promised. I began, you know, before she went away. I could jump off splendidly as long as there was grass to fall on, but I couldn’t jump on. But Aunt Adela won’t let me practise at all now. I wonder——” her face lit up, “Oh—do you suppose there are bicycles at the Crystal Palace?” He looked down at her amusedly. “Why, of course. There’s a track. Races. Awful sport. You ought to get your mother to take you one day, if you’re so keen.”