The thing outside which had caught, and which now kept, his eye as long
as he could see it, was a case in the shape of an upright piano, on the
end of a long, heavy-laden truck, making its way with a slow, jolting
progress among the carts, carriages, and street cars, out of the square
round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the
case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the
eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young
man's willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt,
could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something
proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something
unaffected and yet _chic_, in an unknown personality, than the legend:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,
Lower Merritt,
New Hampshire.

Via S. B. & H. C. R. R.

Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in
pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower
Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white
paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it
filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the
cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines
and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he
instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that
these people's name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed
that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in
losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability