was as restless as I was.

Princess Zara!

The expression as I write it brings vividly back to me the moment when
I stood beside her that night amid the throng of guests surrounding us,
but nevertheless conscious only of her presence. There are some
occasions in the lives of men which they are not inclined to dwell upon
or even to speak about; which they preserve jealously, as secrets in
their own hearts, selfishly indisposed to acquaint others with them
lest some of the magic of the actual moment, reinduced by
retrospection, may be lost in the telling. But I could not recite the
history of my experiences in St. Petersburg at that time without
uncovering my innermost soul, as it was affected and influenced by Zara
de Echeveria, whose charm of manner, whose redundant beauty and powers
of fascination, were beyond all effort at description.

Her eyes were like stars, and yet were not too brilliant. Glowing in
their depths somewhere beyond visible ken, was the assurance of
unspeakable promise; and there seemed to emanate from her personality a
glowing enthusiasm which thrilled whomever came into her presence.

The mere outward description of personal beauty will be forever
inadequate to describe the emotions that influence a man, when he sees
for the first time, the feminine perfection of creation which he is
destined to adore. One may be fascinated, attracted, by any one of many
qualities, or by all of them combined; one may discover perfection of
form or feature, and may accept these suggestions as comprising all
that is necessary to engender that quality within us which we call
love; but nearly always one finds that the imitation has been accepted
for the real, and that it has been so accepted and claimed only because
the genuine has never appeared.

But whenever a man finds the real one, whenever it is his good fortune
to encounter the genuine article, there remains no doubt in his soul of
its reality. He sees and feels and knows. There is no denying the
absoluteness of it. It is a perfect knowledge brought home to him with
an absoluteness, which for the moment, is almost paralyzing in its
effect, and the immediate consequences of which are utterly beyond
comprehension.

Standing there in the presence of Zara de Echeveria, surrounded as we
were by throngs of guests, interrupted frequently as it was quite
natural we should be, we two were yet as utterly alone as if we had
been standing upon a solitary rock in the