pencil. I found no name, from first to
last; only, under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious
that the initials could hardly be discovered unless one already knew
them.

The writing was a woman's, but it had surely taken its character from
certain features of her own: it was clear, firm, individual. It had
nothing of that air of general debility which usually marks the
manuscript of young ladies, yet its firmness was far removed from the
stiff, conventional slope which all Englishwomen seem to acquire in
youth and retain through life. I don't see how any man in my situation
could have helped reading a few lines--if only for the sake of
restoring lost property. But I was drawn on, and on, and finished by
reading all: thence, since no further harm could be done, I reread,
pondering over certain passages until they stayed with me. Here they
are, as I set them down, that evening, on the back of a legal blank:

"It makes a great deal of difference whether we wear social forms as
bracelets or handcuffs."

"Can we not still be wholly our independent selves, even while doing,
in the main, as others do? I know two who are so; but they are
married."

"The men who admire these bold, dashing young girls treat them like
weaker copies of themselves. And yet they boast of what they call
'experience'!"

"I wonder if any one felt the exquisite beauty of the noon as I did
to-day? A faint appreciation of sunsets and storms is taught us in
youth, and kept alive by novels and flirtations; but the broad,
imperial splendor of this summer noon!--and myself standing alone in
it---yes, utterly alone!"

"The men I seek must exist: where are they? How make an acquaintance,
when one obsequiously bows himself away, as I advance? The fault is
surely not all on my side."

There was much more, intimate enough to inspire me with a keen interest
in the writer, yet not sufficiently so to make my perusal a painful
indiscretion. I yielded to the impulse of the moment, took out my
pencil, and wrote a dozen lines on one of the blank pages. They ran
something in this wise:

"IGNOTUS IGNOTAE!--You have bestowed without intending it, and I have
taken without your knowledge. Do not regret the accident which has
enriched another. This concealed idyl of the hills was mine, as I
supposed, but I acknowledge your equal right to it. Shall we share the
possession, or will you banish me?"

There was a frank advance, tempered by a proper cau