ing at dull passers-by, a fallen angel. She had smiled upon him as
he left, and with how significant, how beautiful a smile! The memory
lingered in his heart; and when he found his way to a certain restaurant
where music was performed, flutes (as it were of Paradise) accompanied
his meal. The strings went to the melody of that parting smile; they
paraphrased and glossed it in the sense that he desired; and for the
first time in his plain and somewhat dreary life, he perceived himself
to have a taste for music.

The next day, and the next, his meditations moved to that delectable
air. Now he saw her, and was favoured; now saw her not at all; now saw
her and was put by. The fall of her foot upon the stair entranced him;
the books that he sought out and read were books on Cuba and spoke of
her indirectly; nay, and in the very landlady's parlour, he found one
that told of precisely such a hurricane and, down to the smallest
detail, confirmed (had confirmation been required) the truth of her
recital. Presently he began to fall into that prettiest mood of a young
love, in which the lover scorns himself for his presumption. Who was he,
the dull one, the commonplace unemployed, the man without adventure, the
impure, the untruthful, to aspire to such a creature made of fire and
air, and hallowed and adorned by such incomparable passages of life?
What should he do, to be more worthy? by what devotion, call down the
notice of these eyes to so terrene a being as himself?

He betook himself, thereupon, to the rural privacy of the square, where,
being a lad of a kind heart, he had made himself a circle of
acquaintances among its shy frequenters, the half-domestic cats and the
visitors that hung before the windows of the Children's Hospital. There
he walked, considering the depth of his demerit and the height of the
adored one's super-excellence; now lighting upon earth to say a pleasant
word to the brother of some infant invalid; now, with a great heave of
breath remembering the queen of women, and the sunshine of his life.

What was he to do? Teresa, he had observed, was in the habit of leaving
the house towards afternoon: she might, perchance, run danger from some
Cuban emissary, when the presence of a friend might turn the balance in
her favour: how, then, if he should follow her? To offer his company
would seem like an intrusion; to dog her openly were a manifest
impertinence; he saw himself reduced to a more stealthy part, whic