II
A MISTAKE
Brenda had been out on her wheel for nearly an hour. She had had a pleasant ride, first, along the road skirting the ocean, and later, over the main highway. She had now turned into the “back road” so-called, although it was not perfectly clear why the name had been given. It was used more or less by teamsters who wished to avoid the main thoroughfare, along which the electric cars passed. The back road was only a little farther from the beach than the ridge of land on which Mr. Barlow and other summer residents had built their houses.
But the little cottages located here and there along the back road had no view of the water, they had few trees about them, and they were of a rather unattractive style of architecture. Brenda had noticed these little houses the first summer of her stay at Rockley. But she had never been at all curious about the people who lived in them. She knew that a dressmaker whom her mother sometimes employed lived in one of them, and she had heard that a son of Mrs. Blair’s gardener—a rather superior machinist—lived in another. He had an important position in a factory that was not so very far away.
Brenda rode slowly along the narrow foot-path at the side of the road. The middle was too sandy for comfort,
