I drew down the blind--with such haste as to pinch my fingers cruelly between the sash and the sill.
"Oh, I am _so_ sorry!" said she.
"It's of no consequence," I stammered, making a Toots of myself.
"Oh, but _it is_! and in my service too! Let me be your surgeon, sir," and she took from her traveling-bag a small bottle of cologne, with which she drenched a delicate film of black-bordered handkerchief, and then wound the same around my aching fingers.

"You are pale," she continued, slightly pressing my hand before releasing it--"ah, how sorry I am!" "I am pale because I have been ill recently," I responded, conscious that all my becoming pallor was changing to turkey-red.
"Ill ?--oh, how sad! What a world of trouble we live in! Ill ?--and so young--so hand----.

Excuse me, I meant not to flatter you, but I have seen so much sorrow myself.

I am only twenty-two, and I've been a wid--wid--wid--ow over a year." She wiped away a tear with handkerchief No.

2, and smiled sadly in my face.
"Sorrow has aged her," I thought, for, although the blind was down, she looked to me nearer thirty than twenty-two.
Still, she was pretty, with dark eyes that looked into yours in a wonderfully confiding way--melting, liquid, deep eyes, that even a man who is perfectly self-possessed can not see to the bottom of soon enough for his own good.