thout conscious direction, it had been so well acquired; but the
pretty hand's little impulse toward the heart was an original bit all
her own, on the spur of the moment.

The gentleman went on, passing from her forward vision as he replaced
his hat. Of himself he was nothing to Alice, except for the gracious
circumstance that he had shown strong consciousness of a pretty girl. He
was middle-aged, substantial, a family man, securely married; and
Alice had with him one of those long acquaintances that never become
emphasized by so much as five minutes of talk; yet for this inconsequent
meeting she had enacted a little part like a fragment in a pantomime of
Spanish wooing.

It was not for him--not even to impress him, except as a messenger.
Alice was herself almost unaware of her thought, which was one of the
running thousands of her thoughts that took no deliberate form in words.
Nevertheless, she had it, and it was the impulse of all her pretty
bits of pantomime when she met other acquaintances who made their
appreciation visible, as this substantial gentleman did. In Alice's
unworded thought, he was to be thus encouraged as in some measure a
champion to speak well of her to the world; but more than this: he was
to tell some magnificent unknown bachelor how wonderful, how mysterious,
she was.

She hastened on gravely, a little stirred reciprocally with the
supposed stirrings in the breast of that shadowy ducal mate, who must be
somewhere "waiting," or perhaps already seeking her; for she more often
thought of herself as "waiting" while he sought her; and sometimes this
view of things became so definite that it shaped into a murmur on her
lips. "Waiting. Just waiting." And she might add, "For him!" Then, being
twenty-two, she was apt to conclude the mystic interview by laughing at
herself, though not without a continued wistfulness.

She came to a group of small coloured children playing waywardly in a
puddle at the mouth of a muddy alley; and at sight of her they gave over
their pastime in order to stare. She smiled brilliantly upon them, but
they were too struck with wonder to comprehend that the manifestation
was friendly; and as Alice picked her way in a little detour to keep
from the mud, she heard one of them say, "Lady got cane! Jeez'!"

She knew that many coloured children use impieties familiarly, and she
was not startled. She was disturbed, however, by an unfavourable hint in
the speaker's tone. He was six