ly procession, for the old woman put on her
spectacles and took up her work with a sigh, glancing at her daughter
with so strange a look that Lavater himself would have found it
difficult to interpret. Admiration, gratitude, a sort of hope for better
days, were mingled with pride at having such a pretty daughter.

At about four in the afternoon the old lady pushed her foot against
Caroline's, and the girl looked up quickly enough to see the new actor,
whose regular advent would thenceforth lend variety to the scene. He
was tall and thin, and wore black, a man of about forty, with a certain
solemnity of demeanor; as his piercing hazel eye met the old woman's
dull gaze, he made her quake, for she felt as though he had the gift of
reading hearts, or much practice in it, and his presence must surely be
as icy as the air of this dank street. Was the dull, sallow complexion
of that ominous face due to excess of work, or the result of delicate
health?

The old woman supplied twenty different answers to this question; but
Caroline, next day, discerned the lines of long mental suffering on
that brow that was so prompt to frown. The rather hollow cheeks of the
Unknown bore the stamp of the seal which sorrow sets on its victims as
if to grant them the consolation of common recognition and brotherly
union for resistance. Though the girl's expression was at first one of
lively but innocent curiosity, it assumed a look of gentle sympathy
as the stranger receded from view, like a last relation following in a
funeral train.

The heat of the weather was so great, and the gentleman was so
absent-minded, that he had taken off his hat and forgotten to put it on
again as he went down the squalid street. Caroline could see the stern
look given to his countenance by the way the hair was brushed from his
forehead. The strong impression, devoid of charm, made on the girl by
this man's appearance was totally unlike any sensation produced by the
other passengers who used the street; for the first time in her life
she was moved to pity for some one else than herself and her mother; she
made no reply to the absurd conjectures that supplied material for the
old woman's provoking volubility, and drew her long needle in silence
through the web of stretched net; she only regretted not having seen
the stranger more closely, and looked forward to the morrow to form a
definite opinion of him.

It was the first time, indeed, that a man passing down the