It was in connection with a factory on the other side of the river, which was running overtime, and had not help enough to fill its orders.
"It's women we want," he heard shouted out.

"Young women, middle-aged women, any sort of women who are anxious for steady work and good wages." The emphasis with which this announcement was made perhaps gave it point; at all events this one brief sentence sank into Mr.Gryce's ear just as he began to notice a woman who sat with her back to him on the hotel piazza.
He was not thinking of Madame Duclos at that moment; nor was there the least thing about this woman to recall his secret quarry to mind.

Yet once his eyes had fallen on her, they remained there for several minutes.
Why?
Perhaps because she sat so unnaturally still.

In all the time he stared at her simple bonnet and decently clothed shoulders, the silhouette she made against the silver band of the river did not change by an iota.

He had been agaze upon the landscape too, but he was sure that he had not sat as still as this, and when, after an interval during which he had turned to see what kind of man it was who had spoken so vigorously, he wheeled back into place and glanced out again through his window, she was there yet, hat, shoulders and all, immovable as an image and almost as rigid.
Well, and what of it?
There was surely nothing very remarkable in so commonplace a fact; yet during the ensuing half-hour, during which he gave, or tried to give, the greater part of his attention to the political talk which followed the statements he had heard made in regard to the needs of a certain factory, his eye would turn riverward from time to time and always with a view to see if this woman had moved.