I want to introduce my wife, gentlemen, and my niece, Miss Beauchamp." Franklin really lost a part of what the speaker was saying.

He was gazing at this form half hidden in the shadows, a figure with hands drooping, with face upturned, and just caught barely by one vagrant ray of light which left the massed shades piled strongly about the heavy hair.

There came upon him at that moment, as with a flood-tide of memory, all the vague longing, the restlessness, the incertitude of life which had harried him before he had come to this far land, whose swift activity had helped him to forget.

Yet even here he had been unsettled, unhappy.

He had missed, he had lacked--he knew not what.
Sometimes there had come vague dreams, recurrent, often of one figure, which he could not hold in his consciousness long enough to trace to any definite experience or association--a lady of dreams, against whom he strove and whom he sought to banish.