attentively. He thought her conduct remarkable even after he had
gathered that it was not at his face, with its yellow moustache, she
was looking, but at the chair on which he was seated. Then those
words of his friend came back to him--the speech about the tendency
of the people, especially of the ladies, on the American steamers to
take to themselves one's little belongings. Especially the ladies,
he might well say; for here was one who apparently wished to pull
from under him the very chair he was sitting on. He was afraid she
would ask him for it, so he pretended to read, systematically
avoiding her eye. He was conscious she hovered near him, and was
moreover curious to see what she would do. It seemed to him strange
that such a nice-looking girl--for her appearance was really
charming--should endeavour by arts so flagrant to work upon the
quiet dignity of a secretary of legation. At last it stood out that
she was trying to look round a corner, as it were--trying to see
what was written on the back of his chair. "She wants to find out
my name; she wants to see who I am!" This reflexion passed through
his mind and caused him to raise his eyes. They rested on her own--
which for an appreciable moment she didn't withdraw. The latter
were brilliant and expressive, and surmounted a delicate aquiline
nose, which, though pretty, was perhaps just a trifle too hawk-like.
It was the oddest coincidence in the world; the story Vogelstein had
taken up treated of a flighty forward little American girl who
plants herself in front of a young man in the garden of an hotel.
Wasn't the conduct of this young lady a testimony to the
truthfulness of the tale, and wasn't Vogelstein himself in the
position of the young man in the garden? That young man--though
with more, in such connexions in general, to go upon--ended by
addressing himself to his aggressor, as she might be called, and
after a very short hesitation Vogelstein followed his example. "If