unning away from here a moment ago. Would you
know that man if you saw him again?"

"I am afraid not," I replied. "He was only a flying figure in my eyes."

"Oh!" she moaned, bringing her hands together in dismay. But,
immediately straightening herself, she met my regard with one as
direct as my own. "I need a friend," she said, "and I am surrounded by
strangers."

I made a move towards her; I did not feel myself a stranger. But how was
I to make her realize the fact?

"If there is anything I can do," I suggested.

Her steady regard became searching.

"I have noticed you before to-night," she declared, with a directness
devoid of every vestige of coquetry. "You seem to have qualities that
may be trusted. But the man capable of helping me needs the strongest
motives that influence humanity: courage, devotion, discretion, and a
total forgetfulness of self. Such qualifications cannot be looked for in
a stranger."

As if with these words she dismissed me from her thoughts, she turned
her back upon me. Then, as if recollecting the courtesy due even to
strangers, she cast me an apologetic glance over her shoulder and
hurriedly added:

"I am bewildered by my loss. Leave me to the torment of my thoughts. You
can do nothing for me."

Had there been the least evidence of falsity in her tone or the
slightest striving after effect in her look or bearing, I would have
taken her at her word and left her then and there. But the candor of
the woman and the reality of her emotion were not to be questioned, and
moved by an impulse as irresistible as it was foolhardy, I cried with
the impetuosity of my twenty-one years:

"I am ready to risk my life for you. Why, I do not know and do not care
to ask. I only know you could have found no other man so willing to do
your bidding."

A smile, in which surprise was tempered by a feeling almost tender,
crossed her lips and immediately vanished. She shook her head as if in
deprecation of the passion my words evinced, and was about to dismiss
me, when she suddenly changed her mind and seized upon the aid I had
offered, with a fervor that roused my sense of chivalry and
deepened what might have been but a passing fancy into an active and
all-engrossing passion.

"I can read faces," said she, "and I have read yours. You will do for me
what I cannot do for myself, but----Have you a mother living?"

I answered no; that I was very nearly without relatives or ties.

"I am glad," she sai