she was tall and lithe, and that
she had fine brown eyes and hair. There was nothing in the slightest
degree compulsive or imperative about her. She was just a girl, and
there was an end of it He might have passed her a thousand times without
a second thought, or without a thought at all, but that unhappy extra
glass of wine was in his blood, and he must needs accost her--more,
perhaps, to show off his French than for any other reason. His attitude
towards women had hitherto been chivalrous and shy, and he was aware
of the overcoming of a difficulty which had frequently given him
some concern when he flourished off his hat and asked, with a smiling
insolence:

'Why are you wandering here, I pray?'

The girl looked at him innocently enough, with a gaze quite free from
anger, coquetry, or embarrassment. It might have been a common thing in
her experience to be thus accosted by a stranger.

'I am waiting for my sister,'she responded simply.

Did she suppose she would have to wait long? asked Paul. The girl did
not know. Would she wait under shelter from the sun? She shrugged her
shoulders, and inclined her head on one shoulder with lifted eyebrows.

'Come along,' said the vacuous idiot 'Let us have a glass of wine
together.'

The girl smiled sedately, and they went off together.

The extraordinary part of this business was not that a young man who had
lunched a little too freely should make a fool of himself, but that
the girl was a good girl, of average breeding, and, as Paul lived to
convince himself, in spite of all the unhappiness she brought him, had
never entered upon anything remotely resembling such an adventure as the
present in all her life. But the readiness of her acquiescence misled
him, and in the little hard-trodden wjne-garden in which they sipped
a sugary champagne together, in a trellised alcove like a relic of old
Vauxhall, he grew amorous, and told her that her eyes were like beryls,
and that their whites were like porcelain. The lonely man in the brown
smoke-fog, with the roar of the river in his ears, as unregarded as the
roar of traffic in a city, recalled it all, and laughed as he threw his
hands abroad, and fell into a frowning thoughtfulness as he allowed them
to drop laxly between his knees. The girl had eyes, to be sure--two
of them--and they were brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and,
conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but
she had as much personal