"I should think he was about twenty-five years old, tall, slender, and alert.

He was fashionably dressed, as if he had been, or was going, to an afternoon reception.

Above all things, I should say he was a gentleman." Oh, why are our hearts so accessible to our eyes?
Only a smiling glance had passed between Ethel and the Unknown, yet his image was prisoned behind the bars of her eyelids.

On this day of days she had met Love on the crowded street, and he had "But touched his lute wherein was audible The certain secret thing he had to tell; Only their mirrored eyes met silently"; and a sweet trouble, a restless, pleasing curiosity, had filled her consciousness.

Who was he?
Where had he gone to?
When should they meet again?
Ah, she understood now how Emmeline Labiche had felt constrained to seek her lover from the snows of Canada to the moss-veiled oaks of Louisiana.
But her joyous, hopeful soul could not think of love and disappointment at the same moment.