while the autumn leaves drifted
round him, dancing fairy measures on the grass, and scraping and
scuffling on the gravel, and while children with hoops and children
with balls scampered and screamed in the avenue by which he sat. He was
not particularly absorbed by his book. He had taken it haphazard from
the tattered collection of cheap editions which he carried about with
him in his wanderings, ignominiously stuffed into the bottom of a
portmanteau, amongst boots and clothes-brushes and disabled razors.

"I'm sick of them all," he thought; "the De Beauseants, and Rastignacs,
the German Jews, and the patrician beauties, and the Israelitish Circes
of the Rue Taitbout, and the sickly self-sacrificing provincial angels,
and the ghastly _vieilles filles_. Had that man ever seen such a woman
as Charlotte, I wonder--a bright creature, all smiles and sunshine, and
sweet impulsive tenderness; an angel who can be angelic without being
_poitri-naire_, and whose amiability never degenerates into scrofula?
There is an odour of the dissecting-room pervading all my friend
Balzac's novels, and I don't think he was capable of painting a fresh,
healthy nature. What a mass of disease he would have made Lucy Ashton,
and with what dismal relish he would have dilated upon the physical
sufferings of Amy Robsart in the confinement of Cumnor Hall! No, my
friend Honore, you are the greatest and grandest of painters of the
terrible school; but the time comes when a man sighs for something
brighter and better than your highest type of womanhood."

Mr. Hawkehurst put his book in his pocket, and abandoned himself to
meditation, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his face
buried in his hands, unconscious of the trundling hoops and screaming
children.

"She is better and fairer than the fairest heroine of a novel," he
thought. "She is like Heloise. Yes, the quaint old French fits her to a
nicety:

'Elle ne fu oscure ne brune,
Ains fu clere comme la lune,
Envers qui les autres estoiles
Ressemblent petites chandoiles.'

Mrs. Browning must have known such a woman:

'Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face;'

and yet

'She was not as pretty as women I know.'

Was she not?" mused the lover. "Is she not? Yes," he cried suddenly, as
he saw a scarlet petticoat gleaming in the distance, and a bright young
face under a little black turban hat--pret