hen I heard these words behind me--spoken in a
foreign accent and in a woman's voice:

"Leave me directly, sir! I wish to have nothing to say to you."

I turned round and discovered a little lady very simply and tastefully
dressed, who looked both angry and alarmed as she rapidly passed me on
her way to the more frequented part of the Gardens. A man (evidently
the worse for the wine he had drunk in the course of the evening) was
following her, and was pressing his tipsy attentions on her with the
coarsest insolence of speech and manner. She was young and pretty, and
she cast one entreating look at me as she went by, which it was not in
manhood--perhaps I ought to say, in young-manhood--to resist.

I instantly stepped forward to protect her, careless whether I involved
myself in a discreditable quarrel with a blackguard or not. As a matter
of course, the fellow resented my interference, and my temper gave
way. Fortunately for me, just as I lifted my hand to knock him down, at
policeman appeared who had noticed that he was drunk, and who settled
the dispute officially by turning him out of the Gardens.

I led her away from the crowd that had collected. She was evidently
frightened--I felt her hand trembling on my arm--but she had one great
merit; she made no fuss about it.

"If I can sit down for a few minutes," she said in her pretty foreign
accent, "I shall soon be myself again, and I shall not trespass any
further on your kindness. I thank you very much, sir, for taking care of
me."

We sat down on a bench in a retired par t of the Gardens, near a little
fountain. A row of lighted lamps ran round the outer rim of the basin. I
could see her plainly.

I have said that she was "a little lady." I could not have described her
more correctly in three words.

Her figure was slight and small: she was a well-made miniature of a
woman from head to foot. Her hair and her eyes were both dark. The hair
curled naturally; the expression of the eyes was quiet, and rather sad;
the complexion, as I then saw it, very pale; the little mouth perfectly
charming. I was especially attracted, I remembered, by the carriage of
her head; it was strikingly graceful and spirited; it distinguished her,
little as she was and quiet as she was, among the thousands of other
women in the Gardens, as a creature apart. Even the one marked defect
in her--a slight "cast" in the left eye--seemed to add, in some strange
way, to the quaint attractivene