ancing fantastically before his eyes, and his brain taking in
nothing but the sweet-spoken, foolish little prattle of mademoiselle to
Frollo.

He is thirty-five years of age, he is a hard-headed, hard-working
lawyer, he has a species of contempt for all women, as bundles of nerves
and nonsense, fashions and foolery. He is thirty-five; he has never
asked any woman to marry him in his life; he looks upon that foolish
boy-and-girl idiocy, called love, as your worldly-wise cynics do look
upon it, with a sneer and a scoff. Pretty girls he has met and known by
the score--handsome women and clever women, but not the prettiest, the
handsomest, the cleverest of them all has ever made his well-regulated
legal pulses beat one throb the quicker in all his five-and-thirty years
of life. Why is it then that he looks at this little French Canadienne
with an interest he has never felt in looking at any of the bright New
York beauties he has known so long? Simple curiosity, no doubt--nothing
more.

"She looks like a picture I once saw of Joanna of Naples," he thought,
"only Joanna had golden hair. I hope the similarity to that very
improper person ends with the outward resemblance."

He returned to his newspaper, but somehow politics and cable dispatches,
and Our Foreign Relations, had lost their interest. Again and again,
under cover of the friendly sheet, his eyes wandered back to that fair
drooping face, that piquant profile, those long eyelashes, and the
rippling black tresses falling from beneath the little hat. The hat was
trimmed with crape, and the graceful figure wore dingy black.

"Who is she?" Mr. Gilbert found himself wondering "where is she going?
and for whom is she in mourning?" And then, conscious of his own folly
and levity, he pulled himself up, and went back for the dozenth time to
the _True Witness_.

But--his hour had come, and it would not do. The low French babble to
the dog rang in his ears, the dark mignonne face came between him and
the printed page, and blotted it out.

"She is much too young, and--yes, too pretty to be travelling alone. I
wonder where is she going; and if her friends will meet her? Very
imprudent to allow a child like this to travel alone. She hardly looks
sixteen."

His interest--fatherly, brotherly of course, in this handsome child
was increasing every moment. It was something not to be explained or
comprehended. He had heard of such imbecility as "love at first
sight," but was it